Abstract
IN his presidential address to Section F of the South African Association for the Advancement of Science delivered on June 29, 1943, on "Libraries and Science" (South African J. Sci., 40, 81.; November 1943), P. Freer referred particularly to the difficulties of book selection in scientific literature. He urged that this is not a matter for librarians alone, and that librarians should also do more to secure the writing and publishing of authoritative but simple and readable books on important subjects. After pleading for more care and co-operation in the discarding of surplus or unwanted stock, Mr. Freer indicates measures that are required for the full efficiency of the inter-library loan system. Until the master-catalogue of non-fiction in the libraries of the Union of South Africa is completed, as well as the publication of a new edition of the Lloyd's List of Scientific and Technical Periodicals, with a complementary volume covering the humanities, book-buying and discarding are both unscientific. As regards the imperfections and limitations of present abstracting and indexing services for scientific and technical periodicals, Mr. Freer notes that only forty-one of the three hundred abstracting and indexing periodicals in existence in 1937 were available somewhere in South Africa, and these periodicals only covered one third of the scientific papers concerned. He emphasized the need, for the advancement of science, of a highly trained staff and augmented resources to diminish the gap between the 6,000 titles in the Catalogue of Union Periodicals and the 15,000 acknowledged as being of international importance. Plans for postwar reconstruction contained no suggestions for a national library system, but in addition to national libraries, regional libraries and organization would be required. Finally, he referred to the contribution which science could, make to the improvement of the printed book itself and its preservation.
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Library Service in South Africa. Nature 154, 113 (1944). https://doi.org/10.1038/154113a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/154113a0