104 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1917. 



Almost 3,000,000 references to current scientific publications are 

 contained in these 216 volumes, about 12 per cent of which have been 

 supplied by this bureau. 



Owing to the dangers and difficulties of transportation much of the 

 material prepared by this bureau for incorporation in the Catalogue 

 during the present year has been held until such time as it can be 

 safely forwarded to London. 



It is not to be expected that the publication of the Catalogue 

 can be regularly carried on until after the return of peace, but it 

 appears that the organization is holding together better than might 

 be expected under existing conditions and that when peace is declared 

 it will only be necessary to resume, rather than reorganize, the work. 



When it is possible for all the regional bureaus to fully resume 

 the preparation of the Catalogue it is to be hoped that every effort 

 will then be made to carry out one of the most important resolutions 

 adopted at the last convention of the International Catalogue, held 

 in London in 1910. This resolution was: 



(1) To take all possible steps to prevent reduplication by tbe publication 

 of several annual anil similar Catalogues and indexes on the same subject, by 

 making arrangements such as those now in force with the Zoological Society 

 of London. 



(2) To obtain further assistance and cooperation in the preparation of the 

 material of the Catalogue from the principal scientific societies and academies 

 and the organizations which collect material for indexing scientific literature. 



Scientific bibliographic work is seldom if ever self-supporting, 

 and after the war it will undoubtedly be more than ever necessary 

 to exercise every possible economy in the preparation and publica- 

 tion of scientific indexes and yearbooks, so that the editors and 

 publishers of all such publications will find it greatly to their ad- 

 vantage to cooperate with the International Catalogue to the fullest 

 possible extent and thus prevent the reduplication referred to in 

 the resolution quoted above. This will benefit not only the Inter- 

 national Catalogue and the publishers of the other bibliographies, 

 but will greatly lessen the labors of librarians and scientific investi- 

 gators who have occasion to use such works of reference. 



More than ever before the line of demarcation between the re- 

 searches of pure science and the practical application of such re- 

 searches is being eliminated, and laboratory experiments of to-day 

 may to-morrow be in actual use in ways vitally affecting the welfare 

 of man. It is becoming more than ever difficult to define what is 

 pure science and what is applied science and the heretofore arbitrary, 

 though at the time necessary, limitation of the scope of the Inter- 

 national Catalogue to include papers on pure science only should 

 now be so broadened as to include at least some of the applied 



