The list of books requested by the several bureau chiefs for
reference was suspiciously long. I gave orders that each set of bureau
bookshelves be provided with cards and a box into which to drop them,
and each time a book was used a card was made out for it and placed
in the box. After six months I quietly gathered up the cards and had
them checked against the lists of books for which the several bureau
chiefs had asked, and was then able to order a large proportion of them
back to the library for the reason that they had not been used at all.
The result of this policy is that we have to-day a central
scientific library in which are catalogued all the scientific books
of the government. Books needed by the several bureaus for frequent
reference are placed where they can be used conveniently, and the
card catalogue indicates where they are, so that they can readily be
found. In this way it has been possible to avoid much needless and
expensive duplication. The library now contains 26,652 bound volumes.
We were extremely fortunate in the men whose services we secured
in the early days, and the volume of research work turned out was
unexpectedly large. The question of how best to arrange for the
prompt publication of our results became urgent, and in the end we
answered it by publishing the _Philippine Journal of Science_, now
in its eighth year and with an assured and enviable position among
the scientific journals of the world.
Pages:
643
644
645
646
647
648
649
650
651
652
653
654
655
656
657
658
659
660
661
662
663
664
665
666
667