§ 81. Mr. Leslieasked the President of the Board of Trade how many reports on German scientific and industrial developments prepared by British and American investigators have so far been released to British industry; how many more remain to be published; and what steps his Department is taking to acquaint industry with this fund of information and to assist industrial concerns, particularly those with limited research facilities, to find material of value to them.
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§ Mr. MarquandTo date, 1,390 of these reports have been published, 572 of them prepared by British teams, 278 by American teams and 540 by combined British and American teams. As investigations are not yet completed and because some teams produce more than one report, I cannot say precisely how many reports, British or American, will be published in the future, but I expect that the total, including those already mentioned, will be near the 2,500 mark.
As regards the second part of the Question, I share fully my hon. Friend's concern that this very valuable source of information should be fully publicised to industry and that the process of reference to matters which are of interest to particular trades and firms should be made as simple as possible. In addition to placing the reports on sale at H.M. Stationery Office, free distributions of all reports published are made to Universities, the principal public libraries and chambers of commerce. Trade and research associations and learned professional institutions also receive a token free distribution of the reports of direct interest to them. With a view to facilitating the process of reference, arrangements have been made with H.M. Stationery Office to produce both a classified list of reports and a subjects index. Both publications, copies of which I shall have deposited in the Library, will be brought up to date from time to time. In addition to these works of reference, an Information Bureau and Reference Library has been created at the Secretariat of the British Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee, which body is now administered by the Board of Trade.
The Reference Library contains not only all finished reports but also much of the raw material on which they were based. This work is closely coordinated with the Documents Unit of the Board of Trade which is the central repository for the large quantity of original German documents which have been collected in conjunction with the British and Allied investigations. The Documents Unit has facilities for translating and abstracting and for supplying copies of the abstracts or of original documents to any interested party. The existence of the Information Service, which has a nucleus technical staff and access both to the reports and the original German documents, should greatly assist a firm with limited research facilities and no connection with a Trade 130W Association to find the material of interest to it. In order to give additional publicity to the fund of information, the reports and documents, and the facilities which have been created to serve industry, an exhibition is being opened at the Board of Trade on Tuesday next, 10th December. This exhibition, which will demonstrate both the scope of the investigation and the diversity of the material collected, will subsequently be shown in the most important provincial industrial centres.