REPORT OF THE SECRETARY 121 
member, with suitable assistance, could be put in full-time charge of 
the collections. The duplicates have never been fully organized nor 
thoroughly studied. They include much material that would be valu- 
able in arranging special exchanges with other libraries for compara- 
ble material. Since the termination of the WPA project under which 
an excellent beginning of their proper sorting and filing was made, it 
has not been possible to continue any systematic work on them, and 
the large annual additions that are made to the collections are almost 
wholly unarranged. 
The cataloging of purchased publications and of most of the other 
currently received material was well kept up, but there was little oppor- 
tunity to make additions to the union catalog of records of the older 
publications belonging to the bureau libraries, and none to make 
progress in reducing the huge “backlog” of incompletely or inaccurately 
cataloged books. The inadequacy and incompleteness of the catalogs 
in leading quickly to the information in the older material in the 
library was distressingly obvious during the war. The cataloging 
problem is a serious one, and the only satisfactory solution of it would 
seem to be to make it a special project organized and planned to be 
completed by a staff especially engaged to do it within a given period 
of time. 
Changes in the library’s personnel were the resignation of Mrs. 
Margaret L. O’Keef on November 2, 1945, and the appointment of Miss 
Lillian Treder to succeed her on June 17, 1946. 
The most urgent of the library’s needs continues to be more and 
better-arranged shelf room. The present overcrowding is extremely 
serious everywhere, and in the Natural History Building, current 
accessions can only be shelved by removing older publications and 
sending them to the inconveniently located and scattered bits of shelf 
space available in the attic stacks of the Arts and Industries Building. 
Both the books and the library service suffer badly from such an 
arrangement. ‘The questions of the hbrary’s housing throughout the 
Institution, and of its cataloging, taken together, have grown to consti- 
tute what amounts to a reorganizational problem. The opening year 
of the Institution’s second century would seem to be a most suitable 
time to look for its solution. 
