124 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 39 



be needed to take the place of publications now in daily use ; removed 

 the contents of the old employees' library, had the room refitted as 

 a study, and prepared its shelves to receive part of the archives set 

 of Smithsonian publications; returned to the Superintendent of 

 Documents hundreds of Government publications not needed by the 

 library; grouped a large collection of reprints and separates accord- 

 ing to subject and distributed them among the sectional libraries; 

 made considerable progress in reading and rearranging the shelves 

 and revising the records in the natural history and technological 

 libraries; examined hundreds of current serials for articles bearing 

 on the work of the Institution and reported these articles to the 

 curators concerned; mounted, classified, and filed more than 4,000 

 clippings from the Bell aeronautical collection; carried on active 

 interlibrary loan relations with 50 libraries outside of the Smithso- 

 nian system, some of them in distant parts of the country ; completed 

 the revision of the author file of Concilium Bibliographicum cards; 

 advanced the work of sorting the contents of the administration 

 library and incorporating it with the main collection; and rendered 

 even more reference and informational service than the year before, 

 including the compiling of bibliographies for the scientists of the 

 Institution and for others and the answering of many letters. 



Two of the activities should be described in more detail. One of 

 these was the preparation of a carefully revised and up-to-date list of 

 the volumes and parts still needed in the serial files of the Smithsonian 

 deposit and the library of the National Museum, especially the files 

 essential to the work of the Institution and its branches, with a view 

 to making a further effort — for in nearly all instances several efforts 

 have already been made, but without success — to obtain these indis- 

 pensable publications by exchange. With this objective in mind, the 

 staff began the listing of important groups of surplus material in the 

 west stacks. As these lists are finished, one by one, copies will be made 

 for use in securing by special exchange arrangements, from institutions 

 or individuals as the case may be, as many of these publications as 

 possible. In fact, even before the year closed, the staff succeeded in 

 obtaining through similar arrangements with certain colleges, univer- 

 sities, and public libraries, including Haverford, Harvard, Leland 

 Stanford, North Carolina, Virginia, and the Free Library of Philadel- 

 phia, nearly 700 publications of value to the Institution, among them 

 being such works as Dingler's Polytechnisches Journal, 1820-1882; 

 The Earth and Its Inhabitants, in 26 volumes, by A. H. Keane ; A His- 

 tory of Spanish Painting, Volumes IV to VII, Part 2, by Chandler 

 Rathfon Post; The Haverford Symposium on Archaeology and the 

 Bible, edited b}^ Elihu Grant; and the Annual Review of Biochemistry, 

 Volume VIII, edited by James Murray Luck and Carl R. Noller. 



