96 AITNXJAL. REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTnUTlON, 1940 



publications were issued less frequently than usual, suspended for the 

 time being, or discontinued altogether. In most instances, those 

 that came at all -were very lat« in arriving. Some even were lost in 

 transit. This irregularity and uncertainty put the library to its 

 extreme effort to obtain, before it was too late, all the publications 

 it could of those needed in the work of the Institution. In this it 

 was only moderately successful. The packages it received through 

 the International Exchange Service, for example, numbered 1,329 — 

 fewer by 865 than those received the previous year. There was also 

 a falling off — of more than 2,000 — in the packages that came by mail. 

 This decrease is ominous, for while it may be possible, in various 

 ways, after the wars are over and conditions be<;ome more normal, 

 to fill many of the gaps in the foreign series, probably some will 

 remain unfilled. 



Most of the large sendings were received early in the year, while 

 world conditions were still fairly stable. They were from the Ber- 

 liner Gesellschaft fiir Anthropologic, Ethnologic und Urgeschichte, 

 Berlin ; Yenching University, Peiping ; Reale Societa Geografica Ital- 

 iana, Rome; Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Florence; In- 

 ternational Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, Paris; Academia 

 Romana, Bucharest; Royal Society of Queensland, Brisbane; Royal 

 Society of New South Wales, Sydney; Manx Museum, Douglas; 

 G. W. R. Swindon Engineering Society, Swindon; Pan-Pacific 

 Union, Honolulu; Pomona College, Claremont; and Florida Entomo- 

 logical Society, Gainesville. These sendings were for the Smith- 

 sonian Deposit and the libraries of the National Museum and Freer 

 Gallery of Art. 



There was, as would be expected, even a worse falling off in the 

 dissertations received, especially from foreign institutions. There 

 were only 1,608 of these, as against 5,190 the year before. They came 

 from the universities of Basel, Berlin, Bern, California, Freiburg, 

 Giessen, Greifswald, Louvain, Lund, Lwow, Lyon, Neuchatel, Penn- 

 sylvania, Strasbourg, and Warsaw, and the technical schools of Braun- 

 schweig, Delft, Dresden, Karlsruhe, and Ziirich. Of the dissertations, 

 788 were assigned to the Smithsonian Deposit, and the others, on 

 account of their subject matter, to the library of the Surgeon General. 



The staff wrote 2,502 letters, most of which had to do with the 

 library's exchange work — an increase of 212 over the previous year. 

 There was also an increase of 57 in the number of new exchanges 

 arranged for and of 157 in the number of want cards handled, in 

 connection with the special effort of the staff to satisfy the needs of 

 the Smithsonian libraries, either by exchanging publications or by 

 drawing liberally on the large collection of duplicates lately made 

 available at the Institution. The number of publications thus obtained 



