Photo: JSTOR.
A librarian at the San Antonio Aviation Cadet Center and a patron examining microfilm. US librarians and the invention of microfilm were important to the war effort in the 1940s.
The enduring appeal of fictional detectives like Miss Marple has something to do with the idea that they are very unlikely sleuths. The “mild-mannered” (like Superman’s alter ego Clark Kent) are always undercover, and criminals never notice they are being casually but carefully observed.
Librarians, too, often described as “unassuming,” are not exactly James Bond material. But as we learn in today’s true story, they may provide vital intelligence in wartime.
Katie McBride Moench at JSTOR Daily writes, “In war, as in everything, information is power. And for the United States and its allies in World War II, an epic battle from an analog age, that meant obtaining and transmitting by hand useful intel. ….
“Enter the librarians, tapped by US government officials to help in this effort. These librarians adopted technology from other fields to photograph an array of documents, including those that were rare and/or archival, and found means of sending them across continents. They used both microfilm and microphotography — technologies that came to play a key role in the wars of the twentieth century.
“To the librarians of the World War II-era, microforms were a revelation; microfilm, for instance, was revolutionizing universities. Before its adoption, scholars generally traveled to sites housing materials they wanted or hired locals to do research on their behalf. Microfilm, the product of scaling text or graphics down into miniature forms, made it possible to streamline this process and ship scans anywhere. All that was needed was a microfilm reader on the receiving end to enlarge a scan to the point of readability. This innovation vastly broadened the scope of information researchers around the world could now access.
“It became clear to President Franklin Roosevelt in the months before the US entered the war in 1941 that there was a lag in intelligence gathering. To rectify this, Roosevelt tapped William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, a veteran and lawyer, to develop the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) — the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. Donovan worked with Archibald MacLeish, a Librarian of Congress who saw the potential for librarians to serve as valuable assets. …
“Under the auspice of the Interdepartmental Committee for the Acquisition of Foreign Publications (IDC), co-created by Donovan and Roosevelt, he enlisted the help of librarians and researchers from across the US.
“Adele Kibre, the daughter of a connected Hollywood family, was one such recruit, working out of the IDC’s Stockholm office. Kibre attended the University of California, Berkeley; thereafter she went to the University of Chicago for graduate school, getting a PhD in medieval linguistics in 1930. Like many women of her day, she was denied a career in academia and instead conducted research for other scholars. On one such assignment, she visited the heavily restricted Vatican archives to photograph rare manuscripts; there she saw fellow researchers using microphotography.
“ ‘I acquired the habit of visiting the photographic studio in order to observe philologists, paleographers, and art historians rapidly filming their research materials with miniature cameras,’ Kibre is reported to have said, according to Kathy Peiss’s Information Hunters. Kibre followed suit with a microfilm-producing micro-camera and sent the films back to her employers. …
“Of course, microfilm was only part of the puzzle of increasing the information the US government gathered. … Kibre and IDC staff cultivated relationships with members of resistance movements and Allied sympathizers, creating a pipeline of scientific information leading to the US. Kibre was celebrated for the volume of sources she assembled. She relied on her experience talking her way into archives, museums, and rare books storerooms and on her knack for building relationships with the guardians of these institutions. She cultivated ties with government agencies, librarians, and booksellers sympathetic, or at least agnostic, to the Allied cause. …
“In total, the Stockholm station delivered more than 3,000 books and documents to the US during the war. … The IDC likewise established a station in Lisbon, where its work represented a collaboration between Ralph Carruthers and Reuben Peiss [uncle of author Kathy Peiss] of the OSS and Manuel Sanchez of the Library of Congress.
“Arriving in Portugal in early 1943, Sanchez spent his first few days shaking the undercover agents trailing him. Once he evaded them, he began buying printed matter he believed would be of value to the Library of Congress. He also cultivated a partnership with the Andrade brothers; they owned a bookstore and were Allied sympathizers.
“The three men habitually crossed into Franco-controlled Spain to elude suspicion during book-buying expeditions. Meanwhile, Carruthers, an expert on microfilm, photographed thousands of pages of text, and Peiss, a librarian, developed systems of information classification and retrieval for the mass of intel collected. So extensive was their work that staff members worked ’round-the-clock shifts to photograph obtained documents, using micro-cameras to create microfilms that would be shipped on a Pan Am Clipper.”
More at JSTOR Daily, here. No firewall.
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