keep up with the flow of pubhcation 

 is the collection of abstracts published 

 in several different fields. Their pub- 

 lication is extremely laborious and 

 expensive, involving, as it does, the 

 reading, summarizing, editing, and 

 printing of all scientific articles pub- 

 lished from month to month. At the 

 present time much of this labor is 

 donated bv scientists who would 

 rather sacrifice some of their research 

 time than be deprived of this useful 

 service. The existence of these pub- 

 lications is a precarious one and fi- 

 nancial deficits are frequently en- 

 countered. Since the start of the war, 

 many continental publications have 

 not been available for abstracting and 

 a large number of American and 

 British papers have been withheld for 

 security reasons. 



If, as seems likely, it will not be 

 possible to get this accumulated sup- 

 ply of papers abstracted by persons 

 working without compensation, sub- 

 stantial costs may be expected. 



With the advent of Russia as an 

 important contributor to science, the 

 problem of translating services be- 

 comes acute. Hitherto, most Ameri- 

 can scientists have been able to read 

 the languages in which most scien- 

 tific work was published. Unfortu- 

 nately, there is little likelihood that 

 many of the present generation will 

 learn Russian in the near future. 

 Translation and republication of im- 

 portant Russian works would, there- 

 fore, appear to be necessary and is 

 likely to be very expensive. A studv 

 of the problem insofar as it concerns 

 biology is now under way by the 

 editors of Biological Abstracts, and 

 within a period of several months it 

 should be possible to give a reason- 

 ably accurate statement of the cost 

 involved. Since such work would 

 benefit not only science generally in 



the United States but would very 

 likelv promote the use of English in 

 other countries, it seems proper to 

 recommend that the United States 

 Government consider methods by 

 which the cost of such work could 

 be met. 



C. Bibliographic and Reference 

 Services 



The rapid accumulation of scien- 

 tific publication continually increases 

 the problem of keeping up with ad- 

 vances even within a single field. 

 Every year earlier work is obscured 

 by the mass of contemporary publica- 

 tion. Frequently discoveries have 

 been published in the past which 

 were neglected because their ultimate 

 significance was not apparent in time. 

 The task of bringing these past dis- 

 coveries to bear on present problems 

 is a difficult one. Searching the in- 

 dices of a hundred different periodi- 

 cals for the past several decades is an 

 almost insuperable task. In some 

 fields, notablv medicine, consolidated 

 and cumulative indices are available; 

 in others the abstracting sources are 

 an aid. For various reasons, however, 

 these mechanisms are not wholly sat- 

 isfactory. For example, the index 

 catalogue of the Surgeon General's 

 Library, which is the only publica- 

 tion attempting to gather together all 

 medical publication in a single cumu- 

 lative index, is up to date for only 

 one letter of the alphabet in anv 1 

 year. Few other fields, however, can 

 boast of anv cumulative catalogue of 

 periodical articles. 



Another attempt to meet the need 

 is made bv the reference services 

 maintained as a part of library serv- 

 ice. In theory, these organizations 

 supply lists of publications bearing 

 on particular subjects. In several 

 fields an adequate job may be done 



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