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HASTINGS is now a memory of a conference in which the members of the L.A. heard papers of singular merit and one or two addresses of marked distinction. If we were to select the Presidential Address of Mr. C. B. Oldman, the beautiful Annual Lecture by Mr. Bowen Thomas and the quite remarkable performance in English of Mr. Bengt Hjelmqvist, on the organization of his native Swedish libraries, as the highlights of the general sessions, and Nigel Balchin's model after‐dinner speech as another, we are not the less aware of the excellence of nearly all the papers submitted at every session; indeed, there was not really a bad paper throughout, although some were much too long. They averaged forty‐five minutes. Possibly the Conference Committee set this length; if so, we suggest respectfully that however long the written paper may be the time should be reduced by at least one third for which the audience is required to listen. One felt in several cases that even the authors of the papers grew weary, or were under a sense of hurry, before they reached the end. This was occasionally caused by extempore insertions, a most difficult performance in which few succeed. Fortunate is the reader who addresses a morning session; he escapes the afternoon somnolence.

A necessary foundation of library and information services is knowledge of what documentary material exists. Since no field of knowledge and no geographical area can generate within itself all the information it needs, a complete and universal record is required. While the creation of such a record at a single centre is a Utopian ideal, improvements in national records and in techniques of international communication have made a worldwide co‐operative system a realistic goal. Under the title ‘Universal Bibliographic Control’ (UBC), IFLA—working in association with Unesco and other bodies—is establishing a programme to promote an international network of bibliographic agencies. Problems to be solved are: on the national level, complete coverage of national output and speed of production of the record; on the international level, standardization of formats and the creation of co‐ordinating machinery. The UBC programme is complementary to that of UNISIST: a future integrated bibliographic and information system might be based on two interrelated categories of records—national records of separate publications, unrestricted in subject‐matter, and international records of contributions to knowledge (whether separate publications or not), limited to particular subject fields.

The nature and purpose of the catalogue has been the focus of considerable and vigorous debate during the past decade. This article attempts to identify those topics which have been the most significant causes of the debate and discusses: the need for catalogues; users and non‐users; the nature of the bibliographic record and catalogue entry; the development of UK and LC MARC; standards, including exchange formats, the development of the ISBD, and the concept of UBC (Universal Bibliographic Control); the Anglo‐American Cataloguing Rules and the controversy over the implementation of AACR2; COM catalogues; subsets of the MARC record; co‐operatives, networks and resource sharing; and the development of subject access methods better suited to COM and online catalogues. The relevance of catalogue research activities at Bath University and elsewhere is highlighted.

Early in 1957 a comparison was made in the British Museum between the British Museum General Catalogue of Printed Books (G.K. II) and the Library of Congress Catalogue of Printed Cards, on the basis of a small sample from each catalogue.

The progress of scientific research and technological development in this country requires the efficient organization of free access to all the relevant publicly available information; one of the principal means of serving this end should be the formation of a National Reference Library of Science and Invention; this library should incorporate a comprehensive collection of the currently valid scientific and technical literature of the world, arranged on the principle of open access and associated with an efficient bibliographical information service. This article does not inquire into the validity of these propositions, the grounds for which are discussed elsewhere, but treats them as axiomatic. Its purpose is to consider the implications of the proposed association of the projected reference library with the British Museum.

The International Conference on Cataloguing Principles (ICCP), which was held in Paris in October 1961 under the auspices of the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA), succeeded in arriving at an agreement which was acceptable to the great majority of those present and which has become the basis for subsequent work on the revision of cataloguing codes in many countries. The separate clauses of the agreement, with one exception, were approved by votes varying from unanimity to a majority of forty‐four to fourteen, the exception being a clause of which alternative versions, differing in emphasis rather than substance, received respectively thirty‐four and twenty‐five out of a possible sixty‐three votes.

THE IFLA Conference—or to be more precise—the 34th Session of the General Council of IFLA—met at Frankfurt am Main from the 18th to the 24th of August, 1968. Note the dates, for they include the 21st of August, the day when the delegates heard, as did the rest of the world, of the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Until then the Conference had been proceeding happily, and with the smoothness inborn of German organisation. During and after that date, a blight was cast over the proceedings, and although the Conference carried out its formal and informal programmes as planned, concentrations were disturbed as delegates sometimes gathered round transistor radios, their thoughts on Eastern Europe.

This step‐by‐step guide to searching the literature of librarianship and information science begins by defining the subject area and discussing the nature of the literature. A concise and ordered search strategy is detailed, after which the reader is guided through the principal sources, such as encyclopedias, bibliographies and journals. Having considered these the author discusses sources of information relating to the broader contextual issues of libraries, for example schools. Additional sources are also indicated and the book concludes by proposing methods whereby the reader can keep up to date. The characteristics and coverage of each source are discussed and the author makes a critical evaluation of each text.

RICHARD DE BURY'S prayer that war, the great enemy of the book and therefore of the library, be averted must have risen to the minds of some librarians recently. As we write these lines international relations seem to have reached a boding complexity unrivalled since 1939 and with potentialities for ill as great or even greater. By the time these words appear we hope sanity and a calmer spirit will prevail and that the Christmas we face as librarians may indeed be a happy one. However that may be, the many frustrations all development, including library development, have suffered in the past year, are not likely to be overcome soon. The 35 to 50 millions our interruption for good or ill in the Israel‐Egyptian affair has cost—a relatively small matter financially against our national annual spendings of thousands of millions—are not likely to make for library progress. Yet, paradoxically, our greater advances in modern times have been the outcome of conditions created it would seem by war. The Great World War showed the naked need of the public library service in a way that the previous seventy years of peaceful advocacy had failed to do. Even greater progress came out of the Second World War. What was lost in each of these catastrophes no one has been able to calculate.

This article follows on an investigation conducted by the Unit for Library and Information Research of the Human Sciences Research Council in 1981 for the Department of National Education. The article is limited to a consideration of the aim and functions of national library services. Matters such as the organisation and management of these services, the pros and cons of centralisation and decentralisation in particular circumstances, bringing services into line with modern demands, problem areas in existing services, the raison d'être of national library and information advisory councils alongside the management councils of national library services, legislation of these services, etc. have been excluded from the discussion.