Abstract
THE nineteenth annual report of the National Central Library, Malet Place, London, W.C.I, directs attention to the difficult financial problems which at present confront the Committee. These are due partly to the inadequacy of its income to meet the growing demands made upon the Library and partly to the termination of the annual grants received from the Carnegie Trustees, from whom a final grant of £4,000 has now been received. The annual grant of £3,000 from the Treasury has again been reduced by 10 per cent, and it has only been possible to spend £2,337 on books, the smallest expenditure for seven years. The financial difficulties are the more unfortunate when the work of the Library in tracing out-of-the-way books and acting as a clearing-house for the entire library system of Great Britain and a chief source of all bibliographical information is becoming more widely known and appreciated. The report contains references to the ‘outlier libraries' which now number 149, including those of a number of research associations, the regional library systems, the university libraries, and the foreign libraries which will probably surprise the average scientific worker in the extent to which they reveal the coordination of effort in this field. Moreover, as the regional system grows, the work represented by each book issued by the Central Library continues to increase, as although the number of books issued may decrease the percentage of books difficult to trace and obtain becomes higher. Of particular interest is work on Union Catalogues, and the Union List of Periodicals in the University Libraries has been of the greatest service in locating periodicals. The report also refers to a Union List of Scientific, Technical and Commercial Periodicals in the Public, the University and all the Technical Libraries in Sheffield. A total of 61,187 books was issued by the National Central Libraries and 11,231 by the outlier libraries, which contain 5,846,000 volumes; 2,409 books were lent to university libraries, 1,233 of which were supplied from the Library's own stock.
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The National Central Library. Nature 136, 176–177 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/136176d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/136176d0