RUTGERS UNIVERSITY
The State University of New Jersey

INSTITUTE OF MICROBIOLOGY

NEW BRUNSWICK, NEW JERSEY

April 21 3 1955 CHARTER 7-1766

Dr. Joshua Lederherg
Department of Genetics

The University of Wisconsin
College of Agriculture
Madison, Wisconsin

Dear Dr. Lederberg:

Under separate cover I am sending you about lO reprints of
Dr. Waksman's on the general subject of actinomycetes.

In your letter you state that you are “eager to exchange".
As a matter of fact, I have been meaning to write to you for
some time on exactly this subject. We have the following plan
in mind, if it meets with your approval. We would like to get as
complete a file as possible of reprints from all of the prominent
investigators in the field of microbiology. What we would like,
then, is a collection as near complete as possible of your scientific
papers, so that they could be bound in a volume or volumes and
retained in the Institute Library as a permanent landmark in the
literature of Microbiology. We are writing to several dozen
other prominent microbiologists, and we hope that most of them
will be able to comply with this request. If the Institute Library
can collect this kind of material, it will constitute the nucleus
of an extremely valuable storehouse of microbiological information,
It will be of great historical importance, as well as being
extremely useful to the staff of the Institute and scientists
elsewhere who may wish to borrow our materials through the inter-
library loan system.

We realize that we are being completely presumptuous in
asking you for a complete set of your reprints, but we are convinced
that the Institute Library is the logical place for such collections
to be housed. If we are successful in getting this type of
material, you yourself perhaps will find occasion to make use of
this material.

If you have no reprints whatever of some of your early papers,
perhaps you could send us references to these papers, and we would
be happy to undertake the expense of making photostatic copies
of these papers to be bound in with the set of reprints that we
are hoping you will send.
We know you will give this request your most serious
consideration and we hope that it will be possible for you to reply
in the affirmative.

Sincerely,

Robert A. Day
RAD: LC Librarian-Editor