JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

A while ago–well, more than just a “while”–I bought a large non-collection of pamphlets from the Library of Congress. In this mass of material, all housed in 2000 blue document boxes that somehow managed to be undifferentially differentiated, there was a clutch of about 150 items that had been in the OSS library. That’s the Office of Strategic Services, which was organized and founded by William Donovan and Franklin Roosevelt and solidified in 1942 and which became dissolved and reformulated as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1945.  So.  Many of the pamphlets were analyzed and coordinated for mobility of use, extracting information in abstracts that might enable the pamphlet’s data to reach the appropriate readers/researcher. I thought it would be interesting to share an example of this interpretation or information routing engaged by the fledgling intelligence organization, as we see below in a 1939 French pamphlet on what to do in the case of poison gas attacks. Perhaps this is one aspect of one of the many fundamental steps in building an interpretative foundation for analysis of  multivariate issues; it seems to be that it was simple, accurate, and effective.