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The article looks at the wartime participation of librarians during World War I through the Library War Service operated by the American Library Association, which is said to have represented a moral crisis wherein the acts of censorship and surveillance perpetrated by librarians.

This article analyzes American libraries' civil defense activities during the Cold War along with their decision to redirect their efforts away from civil defense and toward arms control initiatives during the later years of the conflict. During the 1950s, the nation's leading libraries converted their buildings into fallout shelters and disseminated survival information to millions of Americans. However, libraries became increasingly disillusioned with civil defense during the late 1960s, and they largely abandoned civil defense in favor of peace advocacy in the 1980s. The article concludes with ideas for current libraries based on this chapter of information history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the ultimate goal of American doomsday planners during the Cold War was to defend informational and cultural materials from nuclear destruction. American leaders of the time hoped to protect the vital documents that the nation would need to function after a war, as well as safeguard materials related to the nation's cultural heritage. Planners used vaulting, dispersal, and duplication as their three main protection strategies, and these strategies gave rise to "shadow libraries," remote storage facilities often constructed underground. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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During the First World War all the belligerent countries organized reading services for its troops. The number of books and magazines sent was estimated at tens of millions. The conflict historiography has not paid attention to the significance that reading had to combatants. The article outlines the thematic areas that should be studied to develop in future work to provide a general understanding of the phenomenon and its influence on the evolution of the modern library. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the summary of a workshop that focused on changes that were made to academic libraries in Austria from 1938 to 1945. It was held on February 22, 2011 in Vienna, Austria. Various presentations were given on topics including the financial situations of academic libraries in Austria during World War II, how libraries helped with the identification of Nazi-confiscated art, and the changes that Nazis made to the banned-books lists and personnel of the main libraries in Austria.

The article presents comments made by Martine Poulain about a previously published article related to librarian Suzanne Briet. Poulain, who works as Director of the library of the history of art's national institute, Bibliothèque de l'Institut national d'histoire de l'art, describes the historical and political context during which Briet lived, and reports the librarian's attitude during World War II.