College and Research Libraries


' 

By LUTHER H. EVANS 

The Library of Congress and 
Its Service to Scienc_e and Technology 

BACK in the spring of I go I the Li-• brarian of Congress received an ap-
plication from a student at the New York 
State Library School. He possessed admi-
rable qualifications; he was, he said, 
personally known to Mr~ Windsor, Mr. 
Flagg, and Mr. Ashley; he had met Mr. 
Martel; he was available at an annual 
compensation of one thousand dollars but 
agreed to settle for nine hundred and to 
report at the beginning of July. He re-
mained until Feb. 4, I903, and for all of 
that period served in the catalog division 
where for the most part he devoted his 
splendid energies and talents to that new-
fangled business called "card distribution." 
Charles Harris Hastings once commented 
on his abilities in a memorandum to Herbert 
Putnam in these terms: 

[He] is now carrying the details connected 
with the current orders in a most satisfactory 
way. I hope he will be allowed to continue 
the work another year. Should like to feel 
that he was adequately paid for doing so well 
work which one who was not interested would 
consider drudgery and could not do success-
fully. . . . I know that . · .. in filing the 
cards in our alphabet of printed cards, [he] 
finds dozens of mistakes (mostly misprints) 
in cards which have been through the hands 
of all the proof readers in the Printing Office 
and Catalogue Division. . . . I cla1im that 
the work . . . [he] is doing and will do 
(if he helps at card distribution) during the 
coming year, will be higher in character and 
greater in quantity than that done by the 
average cataloger in the $~200 grade. I 
doubt if there are any in the Library, of the 
$goo and $1000 grades, who deserve promo-
tion more than he. 

JULY, 1947 

Certainly that was praise from "Sir 
Hubert" and certainly it was well earned. 
The Library of Congress is proud of this 
alumnus and grateful for his distinguished 
'contributions to the profession. His name, 
of course, is Charles Harvey Brown. 

Now, it is an interesting fact that in 
the minds of many people the Library of 
Congress is regarded as a sort of department 
store of knowledge. If one examines, for 
example, a classified directory of stores in 
a given locality he will find listed therein 
shoe stores, grocery stores, music stores, 
etc. But curiously enough the department 
stores are seldom listed in such compilations 
of specialized emporia. Yet there are many 
persons who when they need the com-
modities offered by these stores go, not to 
the specialized shop, but to the department 
store. 

In certain respects the Library of Con-
gress resembles this parallel. For example, 
in I 943 the American Library Association 
published a Hand book of Medical Library 
Practice. It listed in an appendix a group 
of medical libraries which had one hundred 
thousand or more volumes in their collec-
tions. In this list the Library of Congress 
is conspicuous by its absence. Yet this 
library has within its walls a medical col-
lection of over two hundred thousand 
volumes. Only the Army Medical Library 
and the library of the New York Academy 
of .Medicine surpass it in size. It should 
be clearly understood however that the li-
brary does not now and has not for nearly 
a century attempted to secure an inclusive 

315 



collection of the literature of the medical 
sciences nor has it pretended to the per-
formance of specialized services in that 
field. On the contrary, the Library of Con-
gress long ago conceded the national col-
lection and the national service of materials 
on the ars curandi to the Army Medical 
Library. , 

Although the Library of Congress is not 
generally regarded as being a great scientific 
and technical library, yet it must respond 
to requests for every conceivable (and some-
times inconceivable) kind of scientific and 
technical information. The questions which 
the Library of Congress is called upon daily 
to answer range from Archimedean solids 
to zymology. 

A random sampling of the day's grist to 
our mill includes such requests as the fol-
lowing: plans for the electric wiring system 
of a lake-going cargo vessel, how to build 
a baffie on a radio lou&l-speaker, a list of 
books on spiders and another on cannibalism, 
literature on the .assembly of binoculars, the 
amount of blood pumped by the human 
heart in twenty-four hours, plans for a 
plant for the extraction of gonadotropic 
hormones, information on irregular poly-
hedra, where to buy an Army-type mine 
detector to be used in locating buried 
money, biographical information on foreign 
scientists, to say nothing of requests for in-
formation on the atom bomb, radar, bio-
logical warfare, socialized medicine, the 
sulfa-drugs and antibiotics, ultrasonics, 
isotopes, polarized light, the incidence of 
baldness in males, liquid sulfur dioxide, a 
list of books on aeronautics and also oM. 
a satisfactory sex life (one correspondent 
asked for lists on both topics but stated he 
was more interested in the first). With 
questions on the rickettsias, vivisection, and 
zeolites, we approach the end of the alphabet 
and this is only a very small sampling of the 
inquiries which hourly come in by the dozen, 

either through the mail, by telephone, or 
by personal presentation. 

Organization of. Kn_owledge 

But the answering of questions is only 
one small aspect of our services to science 
and technology. ferhaps our greatest serv-
ice and function is the collection and or-
ganization of knowledge and it is from this 
standpoint that I wish to discuss our con- . 
tributions to the advancement of science. 

One of the features which distinguishes 
modern science from early craftsmanship 
and technology is the process of recording 
knowledge. Thus, the possibility of pre-
serving and transmitting from one genera-
tion to the next, the observations of the 
motions of the stars and planets ( observa-
tions which necessarily had to be collected 
over long periods of time), gave us the twin 
sciences of astronomy and mathematics. 

If we regard the invention of writing as 
one of the great landmarks in the history 
of science, then we may look upon the 
invention of printing as another such event. 
For with the invention of printing man-
kind took a step forward toward the 
democratization of knowledge and this has 
had an enormously stimulating effect on 
the progress of science. One of the results 
of the democratization of knowledge is that 
it not only provokes thought and observation 
among large numbers of people but in so 
doing results iiJ. a cross-fertilization of ideas 
with a consequent increase in the sum of 
knowledge. Thus, the invention of printing 
provided one of the earliest examples ~ of 
the now famous "chain reaction." And 
just as in an atomic chain reaction there 
must be a plentiful and freely available 
supply of neutrons to keep it going, so in 
the realm of ideas there must be a free and 
unrestricted interchange of information and 
ideas. ' 

The printing of books began in the 

316 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES 



Western world in the latter half of the 
fifteenth century and it is possible to suggest 
that it may not have been mere accident 
that modern science as we know it today 
dates its birth from this achievement. 
Thus, for example, Copernicus in I 543 
gave us his theory of the sun as the center 
of our plan~tary system and in that same 
year Vesalius produced the first modern 
anatomy. A year earlier Fuchs had printed 
his great classic on botany, and almost M 
the same time Agricola brought forth the 
first work on physical geology and the first 
work on mineralogy while in I556 he 
introduced the first modern treatise on 
technology. 

Scientific Societies 

And it was also in the same century and 
a half that marked the beginnings of print-
ing and the publication of some of the 
greatest works in modern science that we 
find the beginnings of the great scientific 
societie~ and academies. 

At Naples ·in I556 . was formed the 
Accademia Secretorum Naturae and in 
Rome the Accademia dei Lincei. In· I 662 
Charles II granted the Royal Society its 
charter while in France an Academie des 
Sciences was founded by Louis XIV in 
I666. Similar institutions were founded in 
other lands, and today the scientific and 
technical society is established · as one of 
the foundation stones upon which the edifice 
of present-day science rests. 

The scientific societies and academi~s • 
were organized not merely to provide a 
meeting place for the exchange of ideas 
and to sponsor and encourage observation 
and experiment. From the first it was 
recognized that science was advanced only 
to the degree that its \ results were dis-
seminated. Thus it was that from the 
very beginning these societies and academies 
assumed as one of their .functions the 

JULY, 1947 

publication of the results Qf researches by 
their members. from them came the first 
scientific journals which again, as agents 
in the democratization of knowledge, pro-
vided a great and continued impetus to 
the progress of civilization. 

In I 846 occurred ~n event which was 
to have a special significance not only for 
the scientific life of this country but also 
for the Library of Congress. In that year 
there was established by Act of Congress 
an institution for the increase and diffusion 
of knowledge among men, to be known 
after its founder, James Smithson, as the 
Smithsonian Institution. Among the first 
acts of the organizers of the institution was 
the establishment of a library and the 
initiation of a series of scientific publications. 
The first secretary of the institution, Joseph 
Henry, one of the brightest luminaries in 
the American constellation, immediately 
began to correspond with societies and 
academies throughout the world for the 
purpose of entering into agreements for 
the .exchange of publications. In a very 
short time there was accumulated in this 
way a remark~ble collection. of publications, 
theses, and other contributions to .learning. 

By I865 the Smithsonian collection had 
grown to forty thousand volumes and it 
was becoming extremely difficult to find 
space for the library in the original building 
of the institution. Furthermore, a fire in 
that building (which could have been 
catastrophic) now made it imperative that 
new quarters be speedily found for the 
already invaluable repertory. Thus it was 
that when additional and commodious fire-
proof rooms were provided in the Capitol 
for the Library of Congress, the secretary 
of the Smithsonian Institution recommended 
that its books be deposited in the Library 
of Congress. In urging this action Joseph 
Henry wrote as follows: 

The object of this transfer is not of course 

317 



to separate this unique and highly prized 
collection of books from its relations to the 
Smithsonian Institution, for it must still bear 
its · name and be subject to its control, but 
merely to deposit it where its preservation will 
be more certain and its usefulness more ex-
tended. 

The act of transfer was approved by 
Congress on Apr. 5, 1866. Of this transfer, 
Professor Henry later wrote: 

The union of the library of the Institution 
· with that of the Congress still continues to be 
productive of important results. The Smith-
son fund is relieved by this arrangement from 
maintenance of a separate library, while at the 
same time the Institution has not only the 
free use of its own books, b~t also those of the 
Library of Congress. On the other hand the 
collection of books owned by the Library of 
Congress would not be worthy ~f the name 
of the National Library were it not for the 
Smithsonian Deposit. The books which it re-
ceives from this source are eminently those 
which exhibit the progress of the world ·in 
civilization, and are emphatically those 
essential to the contemporaneous advance of 
our country in the higher science of the day. 

True as these words of Joseph Henry 
were then, they are even more true today, 
for the forty thousand vplumes of the 
original deposit have grown to almost a 
million. Indeed, this collection, continu-
ously increasing in size, is probably the 
largest of its kind in the world. Because 
of the war-imposed destruction and di,s-
persal of _libraries in many parts of the 
world, the value of the Smithsonian deposit 
in the Library of Congress and its im-
portance to scholarship, particularly to 
scientific research, has been markedly 
enhanced. 

In addition to this collection there may 
be noted the library's vast accumulations 
of monographs, treatises, encyclopedias, and 
textbooks i'n the several disciplines which 
come to it either by the operation of the 
deposit requirements of the copyright act, 
by purchase, by transfer from government 
agencies, or by gift. These constitute a 

considerable portion of our total holdings 
in science and technology. Added to the 
materials which are issued through trade 
publishers are the large numbers of docu-
ments in which are recorded the results of 
investigations conducted by the scientific 
bureaus of our own and foreign govern-
·ments. 

Of special significance in this category 
are hitherto secret and confidential reports 
of civil and military offices. of our own and 
allied governments, together with captured 
enemy documents which are now being 
declassified and made public. The Library 
of Congress is one of the depositories of 
these reports where they are available for 
consultation by all who need them. In 
addition, the library is cooperating with the 
Office of Technical Services of the Depart-
ment of Commerce in making copies of these 
reports, in the form of photostats and 
microfilms, available to scientific labora-
tories, industrial organizations, libraries, 
and individuals. 

To make known the contents of these 
reports the Office of Technical Services 
publishes each week an abstract journal 
which has ~he title Bibliography o,f Scientific 
and Industrial Report~. Accompanying 
each abstract is a report number and also 
the price of either a photostat or microfilm 
reproduction. Copies of these reports, 
which can be ordered only from the Office 
of Technical Services, U.S. Department of 
Commerce, are prepared by the Photo-
duplication Service 'of the Library of Con-

, gress and are usually delivered within ten 
days after the order is received. The 
library has already received more than 
50,000 reports an·d has already sent out 
more than 65,000 microfilm and photostatic 
copies. The Army Medical Library and 
the library of the Department of Agri-
culture are also cooperating in this project 
to make research materials available to schol-
·ars everywhe1e. 

318 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES 

I 



Reports from O.S.R.D. 

In addition to the ·reports . which are 
being mq.de availabl~ under the auspices of 
the Office of Technical Services is another 
series which the library is distributing for 
the Office of Scientific Research and De-
velopment. With the termination of 
hostilities it was felt that much of the 
research which had been performed by 
university and industrial laboratories under 
contract with the Office of Scientific Re-
search and Development · could safely be 
made public. Since many of these reports 
had been reproduced in multiple copies, it 
was decided that in order to make them 
available to as wide a public as possible they 
should be distributed to libraries rather than 
to individuals. Accordin.gly the Library of 
Congress in April I 946 undertook to ar-
range for the distribution of these reports 
to ninety selected libraries. Ev"ery effort 
was made so to distribute the reports that 
they could be readily accessible to those 
who needed them. A complete file of re-
ports is deposited in the Library of Congress 
(except · thos~ in medicine which go to the 
Army Medical Library) so that they are 
available for the u~e of the Congress, the 
government, and the scientific public gener-
ally. It is estimated that more than two 
million copies of reports representing be-
tween 'thirty and thirty-five thousand titles 
will have been distributed when this project 
is completed. 

Of smaller size but of no less significance 
are certain special collections .in the Library 
of Congress. The most outstanding of 
these is our aeronautics collection. In I 930 
through the munificence of Harry F. 
Guggenheim there was established the 
Daniel Guggenheim Fund for Aeronautics 
in the Library of Congress. This fund· 
made possible the purchase of a num-
ber of famous collections of aeronautic 
literature, among them those of Gaston 
Tissandier ( I8oo items), Herman Hoernes 

JULY, 1947 

( 78 3 items), and Victor Silberer ( 89 5 
items). Simultaneously, the National Aero-
nautics Association donated its collection 
to us and the Smithsonian Institution 
deposited the Langley Aeronautical Library. 
Thus in a very short time the collection 
attained a position of pre-eminence in its 
field. Now, as a result of the tremendous 
influx of documents and other materials 
released by war r~search · agencies, such as 
the Office of Scientific Research and De-
velopment, the National Advisory Com-
mittee .for Aeronautics, and· the very impor-
tant materials captured from the German 
Air Ministry, the resources of the division 
of aeronautics .will indeed be second to none. 

History of Science 

For students of the history 9f science 
our general collections in science and 
technology provide, of course, the basic 
source materials. There are also several 
special collections which are distinguished 
and important; among these may be men-
tioned the Henry Carrington Bolton Col-
lection of some I 6oo items on the history 
and bibliography of chemistry. Our in-
cunabula, according to a recent census, 
includes 536 items classified as "scientific." 
Then there is the Toner Collection, es-
pecially rich in early American works in 
science, medicine, and surgery. Finally, 
there is our collection of manuscripts . 
wherein are found the personal papers of 
many scientific worthies, such as Franklin, 
Jefferson, Bigelow, Maury, the medical 
Bartletts, Einstein, and others. One of the 
most not.able of our recent accession; is the 
Kastor Collection of two hundred pen. and 
ink portraits of contemporary scientists, 
many of them Nobel prize winners, each 
bearing the sitter's. autograph. 

But despite the size of its scientific and 
technological collections the Library of 
Congress is not and cannot be complacent. 
Great as these holdings may appear to the 

319 



cursory view they are in fact seriously and 
even appallingly deficient in many impor-
tant respects. Probably the most obvious 
lacunae were discovered when, in attempt-
ing to meet the dem.ands of the war agencies, 
we learned that many important foreign 
materials were lacking. Every effort is b!!-
ing made and will continue to be made to 
repair these critical shortcomings. 

Organization of Materials 

Parallel to the collection of materials 
is their organization for use. A collection 
of books placed upon a shelf is like water 
behind a dam. This quiescent body of 
water represents just so much potential 
energy. But let this water be channeled 
through ~onduits and brought in contact 
with turbines, and wheels begin to turn, 
power is generated, and productive work 
is the result. In a library, the instruments 
which convert the potential energy on its 
shelves into the kinetic energy of scientific 
advancement and productive scholarship are 
the catalogs, classificat.ion schedules, bibli-
ographies, and other aids to access. 

Let me carry the analogy a trifle farther. 
In a small water power installation, little 
elaborate machinery is required. In fact, 
a bladed wheel set in the path of the current 
is sufficient to produce power. So in a 
small library, little or no classification is 
required and it can even operate without 
a catalog. But in large installations, es-
pecially those which must distribute power 
over vast areas, the problems of channeling 
the ~ater and converting the . largest 
quan.tity of potential energy most efficiently 
make for a major engineering job. 

The Library of Congress recognized quite 
early in its history that the classification of 
its materials would have to be performed 
on a vast scale, one commensurate not only 
with the size of its existing collections but 
also on a scale which would permit of 

expansion to keep pace with the advance-
ment of knowledge. f'hat the scheme of 

' classification which was finally adopted has 
merit is attested by the fact that more ' 
than two hundred large American and 
foreign libraries use it. 

The key to the library's informational 
resources which, in conjunction with the 
classification system, makes available the 
contents of our collections is the catalog. 
But no catalog ·organized on a universal 
principle, as ours is, can particularize and 
distinguish content to the extent of com-
pletely satisfactory mediation between the 
investigator and the book. 

It seems evident, therefore, that ·the most 
manifest need of our collection is for in-
terpreters, specialists who are not only 
versed in the subject matter of the several 
sciences but who have also th~ skill to use 
existing bibliographical tools and even to 
create new tools whenever necessary. 

Science and Technology 

For this reason the Congress has been 
asked to appropriate funds for the creation 
of a division of science and technology in 
the Library of Congress. staffed by a corps . 
of specialists competent to interpret the 
materials it now has and to recommend 
the acquisition of those it needs. Through 
the creation of such a division the library 
will be enabled to perform a reference serv-
ice and develop a bibliographical program 
necessary to the fulfilment of its duty to 
the laboratory and the bench, to the class-
room and the factory, the advancement of 
science, and the promotion of the public 
interest. 

There is general agreement among both 
scientists and librarians that there should 
be some library in the country where the 
scientist should be able to find every possible 
piece of scientific information to supplement 
the working collections at his dispesal, · a 

320 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES 



sort of federal reserve bank of scientific 
knowledge. And it seems further agreed 
that the Library of Congress is perhaps 
uniquely qualified to maintain and ad-
minister what may well be called the na-
tional science collection, because of the size 
and scope of its existing collections, because 
of the union catalog which enables the 
researcher to locate books which are not 
in his own library, and because of our 
photoduplication facilities which make it 
possible to provide any scientist or scholar 
the texts he requires no matter what his 
distance from the materials themselves. 

Upon the basis of the informed opinion 
which we have consulted, an adequate sci-
ence and technology division created to 
administer our collections in these fields 
should include a chief, fourtee~ subject 
specialists, twenty-one expert bibliographers 
together with secretarial and clerical as-
sistants-altogether a total of forty-six 
persons. The fields covered by the subject 
specialists would comprehend geology; 
metallurgy; astronomy and mathematics, 
including statistics; nuclear physics; in-
dustrial physics, including optics, acoustics, 
and heat; organic chemistry and bio-
'chemistry; physical chemistry, including 
analytical, colloidal, and nuclear chemistry; 
chemical engineering; civil and structural 
engineering; mechanical engineering; el'ec-
tronics and electrical engineering; botany; 
morphological zoology, including compara-
tive anatomy, cytology, histology, proto-
zoology, and taxonomy; functional biology, 
including general and. comparative physi-
ology of plants and animals, physiological 
chemistry, biophysics, zymology, nutrition 
and perhaps viruses, bacteriophages, germi-
cides, antibiotics, vitamins, and bio-assay 
techniques. The plan would recognize the 
Army Medical and Department of Agri-
culture Libraries as national special li-
braries in their respective fields. 

JULY, 1947. 

In this connection it may be of interest 
to note that early in 1947, at the request 
of the Office of Naval Research, the li-
brary established a science project which in 
a sense may be regarded as the pilot plant 
stage of the projected division of science 
and technology. The project will utilize 
the library's experience and talents in 
abstracting and indexing current scientific 
materials for the Navy .bureaus. In addi-
tion, the project will provide temporarily 
a nucleus of specialists who will enable us 
to give as high a grade of reference and 
bibliographic service in seve;al branches of 
science and technology as we now are 
able to give in certain other fields of knowl-
edge. 

Program of Project 

The program of the project has three 
interrelated parts. First, it will abstract 
and publish for limited circulation, the 
technical reports of research in progress 
which O.N .R. receives from contractors 
working under Navy auspices. It will 
organize and index the file of such reports 
alrea.dy received and provide a reference and 
loan service on the data which that file 
contains. Second, the staff of scientific 
specialists. yvill be available to answer refer-
ence inquiries and prepare bibliographies 
needed not only by Navy bureaus and 
officials but by other users of the library 
as well, utilizing the collections of the 
library and those of other government 
libraries in Washington. Finally, the staff 
of the project will investigate the possibility 
of working out an indexing system for the 
records of current scientific research elastic 
enough to include an ever-increasing di-
versity of records and publications, which 
might form the basis for an eventual high-
speed bibliographic service rendered by a 
central clearinghouse of information on 
current scientific research. 

321