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An important activity of the Office of the Registrar has been to work with a variety of organizations for the development of standards for national and international museum data exchange of information about collections. This work will continue and will be accelerated in future years. The Office also plans, in FY 1985, to establish a specialized transportation function that will assist and advise museums and other bureaus with the movement of collection objects among museums and the Museum Support Center.

[[underline]]Smithsonian Libraries.[[/underline]] The Smithsonian Institution Libraries is a major American academic research library system, serving Smithsonian and non-Smithsonian scholars through its collections and staff services. The Institution during the forthcoming planning period will try to address and solve some of the long-standing problems associated with the system. Foremost among these is inadequate space. The Institution will try to provide consolidated space to house safely the overflow of collections. Various solutions have been considered in the past, but were not approved or implemented because of higher priority space and facility needs. While the Institution's policy is to lease new space for programs only as a last resort, a request for this purpose may be contained in the FY 1985 budget. The Institution must also consider remaining renovation needs of the central library space located in the Museum of Natural History Building, along with the need to create atmospherically sound stack areas in all of the branches of the system.

Plans call for a complete, on-line bibliographic date base system (acquisitions, cataloguing, catalogue access, interlibrary loans, serial check-in, and circulation) for the entire network of Smithsonian Libraries and FY 1984 is the target date for implementation. Increased automation will provide greater access to Smithsonian library resources by the national research community and reduce the long-range rise in the cost of library services. Detailed planning for the system is now under way in the Libraries with the cooperation of the Office of Information Resource Management.

During fiscal years 1984-1988, emphasis will be placed on the indexing and conservation of the 225,000-piece trade literature collection, the preservation of collections through new mass-deacidification techniques, acquisition and conversion of collections to microform and optical disc, and the cataloguing of backlogs of various materials by contractors. The book conservation laboratory, staffed by a professional team, continues to treat the most fragile and critical books and papers with advanced techniques and equipment. The Libraries' collection development philosophy and practice are expressed in a new policy developed over the last two years, which guides purchasing, preservation, miniaturization, and all aspects of collection management.

In FY 1980-1981 experiments were conducted with telefacsimile transmissions among selected libraries of the Institution, and since 1978 the use of on-line, commercially available data bases has been expanding. In addition, resource sharing with federal and research libraries, especially