KEY TO ATOMIC SECRETS

Press, Volume C, Issue 29479, 4 April 1961, Page 2

KEY TO ATOMIC SECRETS

Responsible Post For Librarian Not long ago a trim, plea-sant-faced woman was asked to go to Vienna on an important assignment The job: to advise the International Atomic Energy Agency on its information and library services, says a London correspondent. The choice of Marion Gosset for the job was a logical one. As head of the library at Britain’s Harwell atomic research establishment, she is in charge of the world's outstanding collection of literature on atomic energy. Not even America or Russia can match the scope of this vast assembly of scholarship which each year absorbs 4000 books and 13.000 reports on atomics. Behind Steel Doors Some of the material in the white-walled library is so secret that even within the top-security world of Harwell it is kept behind steel safety doors. Her mother (who died two years ago. aged 95) decided Miss Gosset should go to the Royal College of Science. There she got her degree and did a year’s research. But when she began to look for a job. she met the slump of 1925. Then the Science Museum Library asked her to compile a list of periodicals. “I expected to be there for a few months, but I stayed 20 years.” she says. In 1946. Miss Gosset went to Harwell, then a disused airport, to start the atomic library and has been there ever since. She lives in a nearby village in a flat in a Victorian house. To relax, she reads a lot—and goes to meetings of the local Women’s Institute.