Search results

Oneadvantage of living in a democratic country is the multiplicity of information sources openly available. Those who believe in a more authoritarian or bureaucratic form of government can point to the economic waste of having so many lines of communication which often overlap, are sometimes even contradictory and, moreover, lack the authority of the state. The business world does not accept this view. It requires great flexibility in its supply of information. It needs to examine a problem from every possible angle and be given the opportunity to select and evaluate information, particularly in that very wide area where it is difficult to distinguish between facts and opinions.

One of the main difficulties in operating a service for the public is that the public, though very much in evidence individually, may collectively be an unknown quantity. When the service is one offering business and commercial information the difficulties are compounded. The field is fluid, the literature extensive and its acquisition complex. Much of the material quickly becomes out of date. Furthermore, the seeker of business and commercial information has, or may have, many strings to his bow and the part played by any single formal information set up is not obvious.

This is very much a personal view of public library service to commerce and industry and does not attempt to give a considered survey of the position in the country as a whole. It is almost impossible to generalize for there seem to be almost as many policies as there are public library systems and the priority given to this service compared with all the other diverse services to the community which a public library is expected to give, varies from authority to authority. At one extreme there are those who appear to take the view that ratepayers' money should not be spent in contributing further profits to rich companies and, in any case, if such a service is required it is not the responsibility of local government. Other public libraries claim to give a service to commerce and industry but, in fact, make very little positive provision in the way of staffing and stock. Probably a minority of authorities are far‐sighted enough to appreciate that business enterprises pay a large share of the local rates and employ the majority of domestic ratepayers, and that money spent in providing this kind of service is a sound investment in the economic vitality of an area. The proportion of libraries appropriate to each of these three categories is difficult to assess but Dr Clements found that 4 public libraries out of 33 surveyed dealt with 56 per cent of the commercial and technical enquiries. Quality of service is not necessarily related to size of system and there are a few comparatively small libraries which maintain excellent co‐operation with local industry. Next year there will be a revolution in local government outside London and the number of library authorities will be reduced from 381 to 117. The elected representatives and most of the chief officers of these new authorities have now been chosen and will take office on 1st April 1974. New policies are already being discussed and if you feel dissatisfied with your present service, now is the time to act.

Positive organizational scholarship in healthcare (POSH) suggests that, to promote widespread improvement within health services, focusing on the good, the excellent, and the brilliant is as important as conventional approaches that focus on the negative, the problems, and the failures. POSH offers different opportunities to learn from and build resilient cultures of safety, innovation, and change. It is not separate from tried and tested approaches to health service improvement – but rather, it approaches this improvement differently. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

POSH, appreciative inquiry (AI) and reflective practice were used to inform an exploratory investigation of what is good, excellent, or brilliant health service management.

The researchers identified new characteristics of good healthcare and what it might take to have brilliant health service management, elucidated and refined POSH, and identified research opportunities that hold potential value for consumers, practitioners, and policymakers.

The secondary data used in this study offered limited contextual information.

This approach is a platform from which to: identify, investigate, and learn about brilliant health service management; and inform theory and practice.

POSH can help to reveal what consumers and practitioners value about health services and how they prefer to engage with these services.

Using POSH, this paper examines what consumers and practitioners value about health services; it also illustrates how brilliance can be theorized into health service management research and practice.

My brief for this paper was ‘the information worker in his environment’. The best thing I can do at this early stage is to convert that ultra‐modish word into something a little more emotive. I prefer commitment, or involvement. I am thinking of the social condition of which the information worker is an individual part.

THE traditional division of information services into science and technology on the one hand and the humanities on the other, does nothing to improve the provision of information in a multi‐disciplinary subject such as planning. The proposal to make separate provision, within the national framework, for the social sciences, which was put forward by J. E. Pemberton in the November issue of this journal, would only serve to further fragment the sources of information in planning.

At the April meeting Mr Jack Bird, M.A., F.L.A., Education Officer of Aslib, will speak on ‘Taking stock—a fresh look at education for special librarians in an age of expansion’. The Chair will be taken by Mr L. G. Patrick, F.L.A., Librarian, Aluminium Laboratories Ltd. The meeting will be held on Wednes‐day 22nd April at 3 Belgrave Square at 5.30 p.m. Tea will be served at 5 o'clock.

A LEAN year faces many librarians and, of course, their Staffs as a result of the sudden but not unexpected bound in the cost of public services. It creates, as one well‐known librarian remarked in our hearing, not a crisis but an administrative problem. It is difficult to suggest a condition in which such circumstances may not occur from time to time; the former Stability of local government and its officers has been considerably weakened in recent years: a fact which may have unfortunate effects on the recruitment to this service. Most towns, however reluctantly, have accepted the fact that if municipal or other local services are to continue they must be paid for and, this is the essential, at current rates. The butcher, baker, and perhaps most obviously the builder, decorator, farmer and miner, will not serve them in their homes on any other terms. The proverb of cutting the coat according to the cloth means, of course, according to the weave and certainly has not the silly meaning given popularly to it for, if there is insufficient cloth, there can be no coat at all. It seems then that libraries have not all been deprived in the manner that has been the case in a few towns. As we write the national and international atmosphere has a touch of spring and therefore of promise in it and, while there is as yet no cause for jubilations, some optimism may be felt. Nevertheless, it takes a large library a long time to recover from a temporary mutilation of its services.

I SUPPOSE that the library profession holds few more agreeable experiences for an individual than that he should be made the subject of editorial contumely in that piccolo among wind‐instruments, the Assistant librarian.

Hearty congratulations are extended to Miss M. Gosset, B.SC., A.R.C.S., who has received the M.B.E. in the Birthday Honours. Miss Gosset, who is Librarian of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Harwell, is a member of Aslib Council and is well known to Aslib members through her attendance at conferences and meetings and her generous service on Aslib Committees.