128 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1926 
SPECIAL ACTIVITIES 
The regular staff, with the aid of a number of trained temporary 
employees, undertook many special tasks that required attention as 
a condition to carrying out further plans for reorganization and 
development. 
The sorting of the large accumulations of miscellaneous material 
in the Museum library, begun the previous year, was practically 
completed. 
In the Museum library, too, the sets of society publications were 
checked up and missing numbers listed. Many of these were sup- 
plied from the duplicates in the Library of Congress, as has been 
said in an earlier part of this report. It is hoped that most of the 
others can be obtained by exchange, either from the societies them- 
selves, or! from other libraries. To this end, toward the close of 
the year hundreds of want-letters were written; and many dupli- 
cates were taken out and transferred to the west stacks of the 
Smithsonian Building, where they were added to those from other 
divisions of the library and put in order. Later they will be listed 
and disposed of by exchange or by gift. This work of checking 
up and supplying numbers lacking in the various series in the 
library will continue to receive special attention from the staff. 
It should be mentioned in this connection that the six sets of the. 
publications of the Institution and its branches that are kept in the 
Smithsonian library were found upen examination to have many 
gaps. These it was still possible, in the main, to fill, so that the sets 
are now nearly complete. 
The shelves of the main collection in the Museum library were 
arranged, a task that occupied months, as they had not been arranged 
for a long time and were in a very confused state. This was pre- 
liminary to taking an inventory of the library, which will be begun 
as soon as the shelf list, on which much progress was made during 
the year, is finished. 
There was an intensive effort to bring the filing of the Concilium 
Bibliographicum cards up to date, with the result that the whole of 
the alphabetic set and part of the methodical set were filed. In all, 
16,906 cards were filed. This work involved the rearrangement of 
the cards already in the cases. Many cards remain unfiled, but the 
outlook is hopeful, and the current cards are being filed as they come 
in. The two sets referred to are the only ones now being received, 
as the systematic set was discontinued toward the close of the year. 
Another activity that required no little time was the preparation 
of 1,793 volumes for binding, of which 1,497 were for the Museum, 
172 for the office, and 124 for the Astrophysical Observatory. ‘This 
was more than double the number bound in any year during the 
