SECRETARY’S REPORT 147 
for approximately the same sum customarily allotted for binding. 
Because of illness on the staff the volumes repaired in the Museum, 
826, were somewhat fewer than last year. 
Although there was no member of the staff who could be detailed 
to work regularly with the library’s large collection of duplicates, 
time was found to select 36,701 pieces for use in aid of destroyed 
libraries overseas. 
The 10,151 publications borrowed for use outside the library can 
only hint at the actual use made of the library, which is the true test 
of its value to the Institution. Certainly many times that number 
of books and periodicals were consulted in the main reading rooms, 
the stacks, and the divisional libraries kept immediately adjacent to 
the offices and laboratories of the scientific staff in all the buildings 
of the Institution. The library staff itself answered more than 15,000 
reference questions, most of which required the consultation of more 
than one, and some of them of many different publications. 
The housing of the library continues to be its most serious unsolved 
problem. In an institution charged with responsibility for adminis- 
tering research in so many different highly specialized and technical 
fields, a good many relatively small decentralized collections of books 
and periodicals on special subjects are both necessary and desirable, 
but such decentralization should always be made in the direct interest 
of furthering the work of a given bureau or division, never merely as 
a housing convenience, or at the expense of lowering the working ref- 
erence efficiency of the central library collections and consequently 
at the expense of the work of the institution as a whole. Our shelves 
are now so badly overcrowded everywhere that it has become impos- 
sible to avoid committing almost every sin in the library calendar, 
both of giving good care to the books and of giving good lbrary 
service. 
SUMMARIZED STATISTICS 
Accessions 
Total record- 
Volumes ed volumes 
June 30, 1948 
Astrophysical Observatory (including Radiation and Organisms) --_--------- 344 12, 587 
IBUTresulOfeAmoricanvh tHnOlog yeas ssee oe ees a ee eee 145 34, 607 
National Collection ofehinerAitts ssa sae eee nen e ee eee eee 470 11, 444 
INepion ale Vise Cirle eee ee 2, 724 241, 891 
NationallZoologicallPar kee see nee ee ee oe 14 4, 180 
Smithsonian Deposit at the Library of Congress___-------------------------- 1, 800 578, 673 
Bi GHSOmiad) © Ce see er 422 32, 607 
DUG) RSS ESCH DEE SSE ESE SEE SEE SSaae 5, 919 915, 987 
Neither incomplete volumes of periodicals nor separates and re- 
prints from periodicals are included in these figures. 
