150 



ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1953 



The 8,641 loans recorded during the year show only a fraction of 

 the use of the library's collections. Many more than this number of 

 books were consulted in the reference room and in the stacks of the 

 main and branch libraries, while the annual use of publications on the 

 highly specialized subjects of the different divisions of the Museum, 

 shelved in their sectional liabraries, could certainly be counted well up 

 in the thousands. Intramural circulation of the 3,370 publications, 

 mostly parts of periodicals, assigned to the sectional libraries for fil- 

 ing this past year, would alone, in terms of use, need to be multiplied 

 by several times that number. 



Beside the use of books within the Institution, the library serves, 

 and is in turn served by, outside libraries through interlibrary loans. 

 During the year, 82 different libraries throughout the country bor- 

 rowed 965 books from us for the use of local scientists and other 

 serious students. In addition to the many books borrowed from the 

 Library of Congress, a large number of which were Smithsonian De- 

 posit copies, 891 were borrowed from other libraries, chiefly from the 

 library of the Department of Agriculture. 



The reference and informational use of the library was especially 

 heavy, and more than 27,000 questions, many of them in response to 

 letters and telephone calls from outside the Institution, were answered 

 in the reference and circulation section. 



The virtual closing of the branch libraries because of understaffing 

 made it extremely difficult to give more than token service from them 

 to the staff of the Institution; and special arrangements had to be 

 made to serve the visiting scholars who needed to have access to the 

 material housed in them. The scattered, inconveniently arranged, 

 and overcrowded housing of the library throughout the Institution, 

 worsened by the hundreds of volumes needing binding or repair, has 

 long since become a chronic and increasinly serious condition, for 

 the full relief of which a practical solution is yet to be found. 



SUMMARIZED STATISTICS 



ACCESSIONS 



Volumes 



Total recorded 

 volumes, 1853 



Smithsonian Deposit at the Library of Congress 



Smithsonian main library (includes former Office and 



Museum branches) 



Astrophysical Observatory (includes Radiation 



Organisms) 



Bureau of American Ethnology 



National Air Museum 



National Collection of Fine Arts 



National Zoological Park 



Total- 



82 

 2, 142 



62 

 282 



18 

 599 



3, 185 



584, 295 



289, 787 



14, 102 



35, 350 



306 



13, 284 

 4,204 



941, 328 



