The World's Columbian Exposition | Edward E. Ayer | Collectors and Collections, Private and Curatorial | Endowed Acquisition Funds | International Publication Exchange The Museum's first publication, An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Field Columbian Museum, was sent to museums and scientific organizations worldwide, accompanied by solicitation for mutual exchange of publications. Several hundred exchange agreements were quickly established. As the Museum's scientific publications began to appear and were distributed to exchange partners (at that time through the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of International Exchanges) hundreds of scientific journals began to arrive in the Library. In time the number of exchange partners exceeded 1,000 and has been maintained at that level to the present. Each of these partners receives one or more of the Museum's four series of Fieldiana covering the areas of anthropology, botany, geology and zoology. Each exchange involves an approximate parity in the value or number of titles supplied. At its beginning the exchange program brought the Library several hundred journals; by the time it reached its full development, it provided nearly 2,000 scientific serials. The result of the exchange program is the Library's rich and extensive holdings of core journals in the Museum's research disciplines, a collection of rarely held materials that could not now be duplicated.