College and Research Libraries Initiate a work that wpuld constitute the fulfilment of a vision doomed to failure a hundred years earlier but realizable now, thanks to a century's progress in printing processes.-] ens Nyholm, librarian, North- western University. Dissertations ·of 1943"44 Doctoral Dissertations Accepted by A m'erican Universities,1943-44· (Number II) Com- piled for the Association of Research Li- braries. Edited by Edward A. Henry. New York, H. W. Wilson Co., 1944. 88p. This new list, the eleventh in the series and the fifth under the present editorship, again shows thoughtful editing and increasing use- fulness. In general arrangement it is similar to previous lists. The seven main subject divisions have been retained but with ' litera- ture and art now more appropriately· headed Humanities. A few changes have been made in the subdivisions. Metallurgy _has been moved from Earth Sciences to Physical Sci- ences, and Geophysics has been added to Earth Sciences. There is the usual author index. The impact of the war upon graduate studies is reflected in the carefully prepared preliminary tables and introductory material. The number of dissertations presented has again declined. This edition lists 2117, the lowest number since 1930 and one almost 40 per cent lower than the high figure . of 1941. A brief table showing the distribution by large subject divisions indicates the increase in studies in the physical sciences. Sixty-five titles, largely in chemistry, are withheld be- cause they are "secret war research." The most useful of the introductory tables will doubtless be the one showing the practice of publication and loan of dissertations, and the list of periodic abstracting p~blications. Although the practices of publishing and lend- ing are too varied to be tabulated in exact detail, these two should prove especially ·valu- able to librarians on the borrowing end of interlibrary loan. Study of the table show- ing the distribution of doctorates for the years 1934-35 through 1943-44 by subject and years and of the one showing their dis- tribution for 1943-44 by university and by subject, will reward anyone interested in the general trends of graduate work on this level or in the relative strength of the v~rious graduate schools represented. The necessity for timeliness precludes the - possibility of indicating in the annual issues notes regarding the actual publication of in- dividual dissertations. It is to be hoped that at some not too distant date, however, it will be possible to have a cumulative index which will not only pick up the necessarily omitted titles b~t also show when dissertations have been published.-] ean M acalister, reference assistant, C9lumbia University Libraries, New York City. Study of the Army Medical Library The National Medical Library: Report of a Survey of the Army M edi~al Library Fi- nanced by the Rockefeller Foundation and Made under the Auspices of the American Library Association. Keyes D. Metcalf, ] anet Doe, Thomas .P. Fleming, Mary Louise Marshall, L. Quincy Mumford, a~d Andrew D. Osborn. xvi, 94P· Chicago, American· ·Librar.y A~sociation, 1944. Though we in this country have done some notable pioneering in the development of our municipal libraries, we have been slow in applying the same concepts of administration and service to our national libraries. Indeed, MARCH, 1945 until quite recent times ·we have scarcely thought of ourselves as having any national libraries. Outstanding as it has been for many years the Library of Congress, partly by virtue of its name, has taken a long while to establish itself in our consciousness as the national library of the United States. For a similar reason, the Army Medical Library (until about 1936 called by the still more restrictive name, Library of the Surgeon- General's Office), the largest medical library in the country, was the Army Medical Li- brary to us and not the national medical library. The unfortunate result of all this 191