REPORT OF THE SECRETARY 97 



was 7,546, or 1,789 more than in 1939. It should be made clear, how- 

 ever, that a great many of these items were taken from the surplus 

 stock mentioned above and were used by the libraries, particularly 

 the Smithsonian Deposit and the library of the National Museum, in 

 building up second or reserve sets. Other libraries of the system, 

 especially those of the Astrophysical Observatory, National Collection 

 of Fine Arts, Radiation and Organisms, and National Zoological Park, 

 also benefited generously from this activity of the staff. It is expected 

 that the libraries will benefit even more richly in the year to come 

 from the thousands of publications that will be offered to them from 

 the same surplus collection. 



In the interest of the exchange work, too, it may be noted that 

 during the past fiscal year many publications of the Institution and 

 its bureaus were returned to the library from various colleges, mu- 

 seums, and public libraries throughout the country, and from at least 

 one institution abroad; namely, the Bibliotheque Centrale du Museum 

 National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris. These publications, which were 

 no longer needed by the institutions that sent them back, were wel- 

 comed by the library as they added substantially to the supply of 

 material available for exchange. They also, in a number of instances, 

 brought to the sets in the libraries of the Institution items long out 

 of print and lacking. And, finally, they made it possible for the 

 library to respond favorably to dozens of requests on its waiting list 

 of needs in other libraries. In this clearinghouse activity, as well 

 as in the main exchange work of the year, the library had the coopera- 

 tion of the offices of publications, and — so far as it was free to func- 

 tion, under the restrictions imposed by the unsettled world conditions — 

 of the International Exchange Service. Among the libraries sharing 

 most generously in this noteworthy enterprise were those of the De- 

 partment of Agriculture, National Geographic Society, American 

 Bible Society, Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Public 

 Museum of the Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences, South 

 Dakota State Historical Society, Departamento de Botanica do Estado, 

 Sao Paulo, Brazil, and the following colleges and universities : Brown, 

 Columbia, Duke, Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 

 Mount Holyoke, New York, North Carolina, Oberlin, Pennsylvania, 

 Princeton, Rochester, Vanderbilt, Virginia, William and Mary, and 

 Yale. 



GIIT8 



The gifts of the year were many. They included 897 publica- 

 tions from the American Association for the Advancement of Sci- 

 ence; 653 from the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie 

 Institution of Washington; 252 from the American Association of 

 Museums; 216, chiefly on ethnology and archeology, from James 



