While crowded rooms and lines in front of the dining halls are distracting the student in his pursuit of education here, the universities and libraries of Europe and Asia, hit by ideological war with shattering force, are preparing today to meet a crush of students starved for learning. In too many cases, however, they are starting to work without the basic tools.

The basic tools of learning are books. Better than two million volumes were destroyed by Germans and Japanese bent on eradicating the ideas of freedom. Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia lost more than half their libraries; Russia lost 55 million books in the Ukraine alone; the Japanese destroyed nearly every book they found in China and the Philippines. In occupied countries, scholars were isolated for years from the books and periodicals which serve as vital mediums for the exchange of ideas and information.

Replacements can come only from the American storehouse. The American Book Center for War Devastated Libraries, operating this week on Harvard through the Widener Library, is set up to put this country's contributable surplus of source material books where they will be best used. Since textbooks are not needed, little is now being asked of the undergraduate. But from the advanced graduate students, and more especially from the Harvard faculty, a stockpile of books no longer essential here can come. The libraries of Europe and Asia are starving for such scraps.