The Historical Role of Libraries in Scholarly Communication

TH E I D E A of the library as a center of scholarship is ancient and widespread, but modern sociologists and historians of science have recently emphasized how much of scholarly communication goes on outside of libraries: Harriet Zuckerman has demonstrated the importance of the teacher, and of the network of colleagues, in the passing on of scholarly standards.1 Diana Crane has shown how modest a role in the diffusion process is played by libraries, which are less influential and far less immediate than teachers, networks of colleagues, manuscript circulation, conferences and preprint circulation.2 In fact, it can be as much as several years after an idea's original conceptualization that an article presenting the idea is actually published in a journal, thus making the idea accessible in the library. In these pages I will try to show that all of these non-print methods of scholarly information transfer, although unquestionably vital and preliminary to diffusion through books and journals, are, in their international functioning, extremely vulnerable and can suffer critical curtailment in times of war. I will focus particularly on the period of the Second World War, when, as a result of the almost total breakdown of the various interpersonal methods of scientific and scholarly exchange between the Axis and Allied countries, scholars were forced to rely on printed material in libraries. So clear did this dependency become to governments on both sides of the conflict that when the international book trade itself began to falter, official emergency information-gathering networks were instituted. We will see that in both Germany and the United States this process raised the consciousness of the central authorities to the strategic importance of libraries and had an effect on postwar developments in library planning.