Joan Staats, M.S. 



APPENDIX I 



Control of the Literature 

 on Genetics of the Mouse* 



Recent decades have brought an unprecedented expansion in the amount of 

 recorded information of importance to professional activity in all fields. This increase 

 has been even larger in the field of genetics than in many others. Today a pro- 

 fessionally active person must restrict his reading to an ever-narrowing area of speciali- 

 zation and rely on abstracts and summary reviews to be aware of trends in his own and 

 related fields. Not only are there more papers in more journals in more languages, 

 but also increased publication has been accompanied by greater complexity of content. 

 To relieve this situation, many abstracting and reporting services have grown up. 

 However, the absence of such services in many fields has forced individual organizations 

 to set up their own information retrieval systems. 



At the Jackson Memorial Laboratory, the librarian maintains one such system, 

 the subject-strain bibliography. 1263 This is a classified, unannotated, nonselective, 

 analytical bibliography including papers appearing in periodical literature and books 

 in which reference is made to specific inbred strains of mice, named genes in mice, or 

 named transplantable tumors in mice. The project was started in 1948 and was 

 intended for use by Jackson Laboratory personnel only. 



The Laboratory is a global center for genetics of the mouse, a primary trust 

 laboratory for maintenance of murine genetic material in this country, and serves as a 



* This work has been supported by the National Science Foundation under grants G5740, 

 G11551, and G18485. 



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