Abstract
The thirtieth annual report of the National Central Library, covering the year ended February 28, 1946, refers to a gradually growing demand on the central stock of the Library, and on the resources of the regional library systems, university and ‘Outlier’ libraries. Although most of the members of the staff absent on national service have now returned to the Library and new appointments have been made, the personnel has not yet been brought up to the 1939 level. The task of administration has been lightened, however, by the return from Bourne End of all the bibliographical apparatus, the union catalogues and the Library of Congress catalogue, and other material of the Bureau of American Bibliography. These are now at Woburn Square, London, and the transfer includes also the union catalogue, records and staff of the South-Eastern Regional Bureau. Among the more urgent tasks of the Library is the replenishment of the stock of the more specialized and valuable books which were lost by enemy action in 1941, and it has been arranged that the Library, next in order after the British Museum, shall select from the Inter-Allied Book Centre such books as are suitable to replace part of its losses. Another urgent task is the overtaking of large arrears of cataloguing of books which have come into the Library from various sources in recent years, and of much larger arrears of editing and incorporating entries into the national union catalogue and the union catalogue of outlier libraries, and of removing entries for books withdrawn. The executive committee has approved a request made by the executive sub-committee of the Foreign Office Committee on Russian Studies that the Library should undertake the compilation of a union catalogue of books in the Russian language in libraries in the United Kingdom.
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National Central Library. Nature 160, 49 (1947). https://doi.org/10.1038/160049c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/160049c0