APPENDIX 9 
REPORT ON THE LIBRARY 
Sir: I have the honor to submit the following report on the ac- 
tivities of the Smithsonian library for the fiscal year ended June 30, 
1944: 
From the point of view of use, the year has been an outstanding 
one. Never before in the history of the world have books played so 
significant a part in the successful waging of war. As the war goes 
on, the potential importance of all recorded items of human know]- 
edge through integration with others becomes increasingly evident, 
and often is strikingly demonstrated. It seems a far cry from the 
bookstacks of a scientific library to the battlefields of Africa or the 
South Pacific, but this is a scientific war, and many lives have been 
saved by the exactly right bit of information about an insect, a plant, 
an animal, the shore line of a far-away island, or other natural 
features of strange lands found in little-known journals and docu- 
ments on library shelves. 
In the Smithsonian library examples of the conversion to wartime 
uses of the published results of peacetime scientific investigations and 
explorations might be multiplied almost indefinitely, for the library 
has been increasingly used by the war agencies and by individuals in 
the armed forces. In the Museum library alone, where a count of 
reference questions coming from these sources was kept, there were 
520 requests for information, many of which required a very consider- 
able amount of research to answer. The library of the Bureau of 
American Ethnology was frequently called upon, and the resources 
of the Astrophysical Observatory library were often in demand, es- 
pecially through the loan of scientific journals to other libraries. The 
staff of the Ethnogeographic Board constantly searched all the branch 
libraries for material useful to its various projects in aid of the war 
agencies. 
War use also accounts for the rise in the number of interlibrary 
loans from 687 in 1948 to 1,363 during the year just past. 
The library’s large collection of duplicates, too, has been drawn 
upon by other departments of the Government, and many publications 
no longer needed have been sent to fill gaps in sets in the older de- 
partmental libraries or to help build up special collections in the more 
recently established war agencies.. 
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