REPORT 0^ THE SECRETARY 121 



and correspondents far and near — requests often involving hours 

 of search not only at the Institution but at the Library of Congress 

 and elsewhere. They kept the index of Smithsonian publications up 

 to date, and made considerable progress with the index of Smith- 

 sonian explorations begun the previous year, and some with that of 

 exchange relations. Their work on the union catalog may be sum- 

 marized as follows: 



Volumes cataloged 2, 472 



Pamphlets and charts cataloged 1,947 



New serial entries made 178 



Tjrped cards added to catalog and shelf list 3,880 



Library of Congress cards added to catalog and shelf list 13,662 



OTHER ACTIVITIES 



As has already been suggested, one of the main activities of the 

 staff, apart from their routine duties, was that of making lists of 

 the longer runs of surplus items in the west stacks and checking 

 them against the needs of the Smithsonian libraries. Another task 

 was that of bringing nearly to completion the checking of the serial 

 holdings of several of the libraries, to be included in the forthcoming 

 second edition of the Union List of Serials. When this work is 

 finished, it will have involved the examination of the records of more 

 than 7,000 sets of serial publications, not including, of course, the 

 thousands in the Smithsonian Deposit and the Langley Aeronautical 

 Library, which, as they are housed in the Library of Congress, are 

 reported by that Library. Still another task was selecting consign- 

 ments of duplicates for exchange, especially with such universities 

 as Brown, Columbia, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale. 

 And another was preparing the exhibition set of Smithsonian pub- 

 lications — by completing it and having many of its volumes bound — 

 for transfer to the shelves provided for it as an outstanding part 

 of the exhibit of Smithsonian interests in the "Diffusion of Knowl- 

 edge" room at the Institution. And, finally, among other tasks were 

 the following: Sending a large number of foreign documents, which 

 had come to light in course of checking the surplus material, to the 

 Library of Congress; sorting 2,500 or more reprints by subject and 

 assigning them to the appropriate sectional libraries of the National 

 Museum; carrying forward the inventorying of the technological 

 library, with revision of its catalog and shelf list, and the rearranging 

 of the oflBce library; and continuing, with excellent results, the work 

 of reorganizing the library of the Bureau of American Ethnology. 



BINDING 



Again, lack of funds seriously limited the libraries in meeting their 

 binding needs. This was true in respect both to the thousands of 



