Abstract
A REPORT on the progress made during the last year by the Organisation for the Interchange of Technical Publications in Sheffield was presented to the fifteenth annual general meeting held in the Central. Library, Sheffield, on December 2. This Organisation controls a system of co-operative borrowing of books, periodicals and other records, between the numerous special libraries in the Sheffield area. Recent activities of the Organisation have been directed to other ways of assisting research and development now that the effective pooling of technical publications and information has been operating for many years. The annual report shows that 1,459 publications were borrowed last year. A survey of the location of foreign patents in British libraries was undertaken ; through the Association of Special Libraries and Information Bureaux, the Patents Office was asked to close the gap in indexes and abridgments to British patent specifications left during the War; and an inquiry made as to the amount of assistance obtainable from the Neder -landsch Instituut voor Documentatie en Registratuur in foreign patent searches. At the annual general meeting, it was decided to ask the Board of Trade to have the mass of documents relating to war-time German industry held by the Technical Information and Documents Unit of the Board abstracted and indexed on similar lines to the work done in the United States by the Air Technical Intelligence and to have the more important items translated on the advice of technical experts. It was also recommended that files of the microfilms taken by the Board of machine drawings selected from this collection should be deposited with the leading technical libraries of Britain. Twenty-four firms and seven societies and institutions now belong to the Organisation.
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Interchange of Technical Publications in Sheffield. Nature 161, 305 (1948). https://doi.org/10.1038/161305b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/161305b0