SECRETARY'S REPORT 145 



Noteworthy publications among the 3,859 transferred to other scien- 

 tific libraries of the Government were 604 medical dissertations sent to 

 the Army Medical Library. 



Cataloging and entry of current accessions of books and periodicals 

 were kept up, but with difficulty under the serious handicap of under- 

 staffing. 



The number of volumes cataloged was 6,991, and 29,981 cards were 

 filed in catalogs and shelflists. Periodical entries numbered 17,854. 



There was little opportunity to continue the much-needed work of 

 correlating and unifying entries in the periodical records with those 

 in the catalog, but some progress was made in the last quarter toward 

 completing this project. 



An important piece of work completed by the staff was the check- 

 ing of Smithsonian serial holdings for inclusion in the forthcoming 

 Supplement to the Union List of Serials in Libraries of the United 

 States and Canada, consisting mostly of new titles published in the 

 years 1944-49. The library reported holdings of 473 of the titles listed 

 in the checking edition, and added 19 new titles not appearing in 

 the checklist. This cooperative undertaking on the part of the prin- 

 cipal libraries of this country and Canada results in the continuation 

 of one of the library's most useful and time-saving bibliographical 

 tools. 



Small withdrawals were frequently made from the collection of 

 duplicates, and 2,415 pieces from among the titles specially wanted 

 by participating libraries of the United States Book Exchange were 

 sent to the stockpile at that center for exchange credit. 



With funds allotted for binding, 1,250 volumes, mostly periodicals, 

 were prepared for binding and sent to the Government Printing 

 Office. In the Museum library, 1,300 old books and pamphlets, some 

 of them irreplaceable, were repaired. There continues to be a large 

 backlog of binding and repair. 



The library's service to readers and research workers, both in and 

 outside the Institution, its primary reason for being, is so full of 

 intangibles that statistics of circulation and such other countable 

 records as it is possible to keep, where there are so many decentralized 

 units without immediate library supervision, can do little more than 

 suggest the actual work and time required to produce the right pub- 

 lication or to answer a question accurately. 



The reference use of the library was increasingly heavy in all its 

 branches, and answers to 17,688 reference questions were given, many 

 of them requiring hours of painstaking research among out-of-the- 

 way sources. 



Loan-desk records show that 11,869 publications were borrowed by 

 members of the staff of the Institution and by 101 different Govern- 



