194 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 195 6 



limited funds. The general principle of selection is that priority shall 

 be given to important works of reference for the common use of all, 

 and to primary sources of special information. After buying 575 

 books and subscribing to 426 periodicals, funds for the year were 

 exhausted, leaving large numbers of requisitions still unprocessed in 

 the acquisitions section. 



There was little opportunity to reduce the library's continuing file 

 of desiderata among the out-of-print source books so important in 

 museum work. Far too seldom are there funds available when one 

 or another of these works appears, unpredictably, in the old-book 

 market. The library has no interest in acquiring collectors' items, per 

 se, but a good many of the most-needed older books, especially in the 

 fields of natural history and the fine arts, fall into that category and 

 are likely to be prohibitively costly. One of the library's continually 

 recurring problems is how to get the use of rare books not in its own 

 collections. Rare books seldom can be borrowed from other libraries, 

 microfilms are not very satisfactory, especially when they must be 

 read and referred to in comparison with specimens, and photostats of 

 more than a few pages are likely to be almost as expensive as the 

 original works. 



The library added 5,918 publications to the Smithsonian Deposit, 

 and sent more than 20,000 other publications to the Library of Con- 

 gress without recording them individually. These included doctoral 

 dissertations, foreign and state documents, and miscellaneous books, 

 papers, and periodicals on subjects not pertinent to the work of the 

 Institution. There were 657 medical dissertations sent to the Armed 

 Forces Medical Library. 



The catalog section classified and cataloged 4,748 volumes, entered 

 20,534 periodicals, and filed 29,553 catalog cards. In the latter part 

 of the year, the staff of the section, after an initial survey of the very 

 large accumulation of wholly or incompletely cataloged material in 

 the library of the Bureau of American Ethnology, made a very good 

 beginning in sorting and arranging it for processing or other disposi- 

 tion. With the advice of the Director of the Bureau, 2,675 of the 

 pieces so far handled were discarded. The work will be continued, 

 as time permits, during the coming year. 



The library recorded the loan of 9,276 volumes, 1,127 of which were 

 interlibrary loans to 88 different libraries throughout the United 

 States. The record of intramural loans never represents more than 

 a fractional part of the circulation of books and periodicals among 

 members of the staff of the Institution. Publications assigned to the 

 different sectional libraries for filing circulate freely within the sec- 

 tion, without being counted, except in the Division of Insects where 



