National Service: the University of London Library during the Second World War by Karen Attar
During the Second World War, the Ministry of Information occupied London’s Senate House. The University of London Library continued to function in the building, primarily to serve the Ministry. A wartime diary, memoirs and general correspondence supplement library committee reports and minutes to record this period of the library’s history unusually richly, and this article uses archival sources to describe the library’s operations during the war. It thereby not only opens up a hitherto unexplored area of the library’s history, but sheds light on daily institutional life in central London, and on the human side of the Ministry of Information.