168 Director's Report for 1919. 
for press work, and the Museum printer was enabled to devote 
his time to miscellaneous work. 
A comparative study of costs, quality and conditions of work 
in various establishments resulted in a decision to dispose of the 
printing equipment owned by the Museum and to contract with 
some reliable concern for all printing required. 
SPECIAL TOPICS 
LIBRARY 
During the year, the present condition, the scope, purpose, 
and needs of the Museum Library have been given considera- 
tion by the Trustees, the Librarian, and the Acting Director. It 
was found that the Library is unusually rich in ethnological works 
of Pacific races and in accounts of early voyagers. Most of the 
books are essential to students within the Polynesian field and 
some of them could be replaced with difficulty. Compared with 
similar institutions, the Library of the Museum is relatively defi- 
cient in maps and other geographic material, in general reference 
works and compendia and in results of researches in Natural His- 
tory published during the last decade. The report of the Committee 
on Publication is summarized as follows: 
“Your Committee believes that the library should be built 
on the lines already marked out and should eventually occupy 
first rank as a center for students interested in Polynesian prob- 
lems; that it should be enriched by large additions of scattered 
pamphlets of recent date bearing on Polynesian Ethnology and 
Natural History and that outside this field purchases should aim 
primarily at procuring reliable works for comparative study and 
treatises needed by students. The library should be primarily for 
use of scientific investigators, and works of merely popular inter- 
est should find no place on the shelf. The guiding principle 
should be not to make a complete or well-rounded library but to 
get together publications likely to aid students of Pacific Ocean 
and especially of Polynesian problems. With this principle in 
mind it is probably unnecessary to list the subdivisions of natural 
history which should be represented.” 
The funds allotted to carry out the policy adopted by the 
[8] 
