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FROM THE GROWING NEED, AS IDENTIFIED BY OUR COMPANY'S managers and specialists for more skills training in interviewing, a small team (the authors of this article) set out to examine what Central Training Services were now offering in this area and how it could be improved. Existing at the time were two modules concerned with specific types of interview, selection and appraisal. Each module discussed their processes in relation to the company and both included role‐playing interviewing with feedback using CCTV and behaviour analysis. Related sessions were also included on management, supervisory and sales courses under such titles as ‘interpersonal skills and communications’.

I REMEMBER one elderly librarian who insisted on keeping the works of obscure authors like Lermontov on the shelves, even when faced with the plain fact that no dates were ever stamped on the labels of the books in question. Whatever happened, the books stayed, year‐in, year‐out. Here, then, was a librarian of the old school, a guardian of culture, keeping to his post while the inner‐city housewives ran for the Mills and Boons on the returned‐books trolley like piranhas hot on the scent of human flesh. He didn't care: sitting at his desk, making careful notations on the backs of book‐cards, he could ignore the crowd and think about Lermontov.

An overview of the current use of handwritten text recognition (HTR) on archival manuscript material, as provided by the EU H2020 funded Transkribus platform. It explains HTR, demonstrates Transkribus, gives examples of use cases, highlights the affect HTR may have on scholarship, and evidences this turning point of the advanced use of digitised heritage content. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper adopts a case study approach, using the development and delivery of the one openly available HTR platform for manuscript material.

Transkribus has demonstrated that HTR is now a useable technology that can be employed in conjunction with mass digitisation to generate accurate transcripts of archival material. Use cases are demonstrated, and a cooperative model is suggested as a way to ensure sustainability and scaling of the platform. However, funding and resourcing issues are identified.

The paper presents results from projects: further user studies could be undertaken involving interviews, surveys, etc.

Only HTR provided via Transkribus is covered: however, this is the only publicly available platform for HTR on individual collections of historical documents at time of writing and it represents the current state-of-the-art in this field.

The increased access to information contained within historical texts has the potential to be transformational for both institutions and individuals.

This is the first published overview of how HTR is used by a wide archival studies community, reporting and showcasing current application of handwriting technology in the cultural heritage sector.

ON MAY 1ST, 1766, diligent newspaper readers, perusing the front pages of their favourite journals over breakfast, noticed a brief announcement amongst the plethora of advertisements for miracle cures and infallible nostrums. It read: ‘This day is published: elegantly printed on fine medium writing‐paper, in quarto, price five shilings, The New Bath Guide: or Memoirs of the B—n—r—d family. In a series of poetical epistles … Sold by J. Dodsley in Pall Mall’.

Viewing the last dying embers of 1984, the Orwel‐lian year of Big Brother and some of its not‐so‐far off the mark predictions, the unemployment which one cannot help feeling is more apparent than real, it is hardly surprising that the subject of Poverty or the so‐called Poverty arise. The real poverty of undernourished children, soup kitchens, children suffering at Christmas, hungry children ravenously consuming free school meals has not, even now, returned.

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Term. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Tenn. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.

This is indeed the age of revolution, when timeless attitudes are changing and new ways of living being born. To most it is a bewildering complex, with uneasy forbodirtgs of the outcome. Improvement and change, there must always be—although change is not necessarily progress—but with unrest in the schools, universities and industry, one naturally questions if this is the right time for such sweeping reorganization as now seems certain to take place in local government and in the structure of the national health service. These services have so far escaped the destructive influences working havoc in other spheres. Area health boards to administer all branches of the national health service, including those which the National Health Service Act, 1946 allowed local health authorities to retain, were recommended by the Porritt Committee a number of years ago, when it reviewed the working of the service.

IT IS BY direction of NLW'S Subscription Department—to whom I have the good fortune to have been married for nigh on 16 years—that I open my first column of the new year with a lot of gubbins about subscriptions and their administration. Do please read it and, if appropriate, take action, or I'll never hear the end of it.

It's been three years since my previous survey in RSR. Superb reference books in pop music have been appearing so frequently that I've been having trouble keeping up. Let's hope “next year's” survey will only be 12 months in the making and not 36.