Authors

Emmeline Ledgerwood¹;  ¹ The British Library, UK

Discussion

When the British Library was formed in 1973, it brought together a number of national libraries including the National Lending Library for Science and Technology (NLLST). NLLST had opened at Boston Spa, Yorkshire, in 1962 with the aim of collecting “the literature of the world which may be of value to the scientist and technologist”, and proposals for this library originated in discussions about the scientific community’s needs for access to current literature, exemplified by the Royal Society’s 1948 Conference on Scientific Information. One of the challenges for scientific libraries at that time was set out in 1956 by the UK's Advisory Council on Scientific Policy: “the difficulty of handling the ever-increasing output of Russian scientific and technical literature”.
The creation of NLLST was the responsibility of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) which was already co-ordinating efforts both in the UK and overseas to expand the acquisition and translation of Russian-language scientific literature for Western scientists. In this respect DSIR and NLLST staff corresponded not only with librarians in government research establishments, learned societies, research associations and private sector organisations but also with individual scientists, commercial translation agencies, scientific attachés and senior civil servants.
Drawing on NLLST papers and other public records, this paper discusses the role that NLLST, scientific librarians and technical translators played in facilitating access to Russian-language scientific literature in the UK when geopolitical tensions made the diffusion of knowledge challenging. While there are a number of existing studies that have examined relationships between information professionals in the USA and countries of the former Eastern bloc, less is known about the individual efforts in the UK to organise programmes of acquisition, translation and publication that would allow English speakers to keep up to date with Russian scientific advances.
This paper shows that scientific librarians in the UK developed personal and professional relationships with their counterparts in the Eastern bloc through activities that we would today describe as science diplomacy. In so doing it reveals an aspect of twentieth century knowledge exchange that has received little attention in the historical literature. It also poses questions about the extent to which the DSIR, the government department for civil research, actively contributed to the Cold War intelligence gathering activities of the Ministry of Defence.