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Adapting to change is never easy, particularly when everything is moving so fast that one has less and less time to devote to thinking about the transition process. We are all rather like white water canoeists: carried on rapid waters in a small and fragile boat — in danger of being either sunk or left on the bank — and, with head over paddle, unable to see very far ahead. The change always seems to be external and it is difficult to answer such questions as what change and for what purpose and even if we knew the answers it is unclear to what extent we are capable of affecting the outcomes. What might be helpful is to examine some of the undercurrents that are propelling us forward, affecting our work and our perceptions of our professional role.

Recent research places an increased emphasis on the inclusion of the customer in value creation, learning and innovation processes; yet, there remains a gap in the understanding of just how such customer involvement may work. This paper aims to address this gap by examining two aspects of customer involvement – their knowledgeability and their agency. In addition, three boundaries (semantic, syntactic and pragmatic) across which relationship development occurs and which may facilitate and/or inhibit value co-creation, collaborative learning and innovation processes have been explored.

Three case studies have been used. Two were large-scale construction projects in the UK, and one was a global professional accounting firm in the USA.

Customers may become frustrated if not allowed to exercise their agency. However, their involvement can create tensions for suppliers who may have to become more tolerant of divergent goals. In respect of knowledgeability, it was found that constraint satisfaction is important in allowing customers to reconcile their personal knowledge schema with the collective schema. However, it was also noted that customer knowledgeability brings with it challenges for suppliers, who must find ways to add value for such customers.

A number of further questions relating to the agency and knowledgeability of customers and their inclusion in value co-creation, collaborative learning and innovation processes have been posed. The need for guidance in identifying and minimising the barriers to crossing semantic, syntactic and pragmatic boundaries between customers and suppliers has also been highlighted.

This study makes an important contribution to research in the field, in that how the inclusion of the customer in business networks alters current assumptions and practices is investigated.

The construction industry has particular problems in its handling of general and project documentation, arising largely from the separation of the design and construction functions, and the large number of firms involved. The Department of the Environment has issued a report proposing improvements in the total information system which suggests that classification is the key factor in any programme of work. In this paper a general account is given of the problems, the work of the DoE, the existing schemes; and proposals are put forward for the compilation of a ‘metasystem’ which would be used to control or steer the conventions used for information handling.

During 1968 Aslib and the Library Association agreed to collaborate in the production of a new abstracts service, starting in 1969, to cover their combined areas of interest. Two issues of Library and Information Science Abstracts have now appeared and though this brief note of progress may appear somewhat premature it is the intention of the LISA editor and his Advisory Committee to maintain a critical watch on the performance of LISA. Such an attitude is a proper continuation of two reports which examined abstracting services in documentation and library science, and Library Science Abstracts in particular, and which laid the foundation for LISA. A full account of the events leading to the publication of LISA, including attempts to collaborate with Referativnyi Zhurnal and Documentation Abstracts (renamed Information Science Abstracts in the March 1969 issue), appeared earlier this year. The initial intention behind the analysis of only two issues of LISA was to provide a comparison with various figures of throughput predicted during planning. A good correspondence was found; for example, the predicted total for 1969 of 2,489 abstracts is only slightly higher than the figure of 2,379 extrapolated from the first two issues. However, users of the service will be interested in actual performance rather than predictions.

With the thirteenth issue affected by the recent postal strike, now seems an opportune moment to take a look at the performance of LISA in its first two years. This bi‐monthly abstracts service succeeded the former Library Science Abstracts in 1969 as a joint venture between the Library Association and Aslib. An account of its birth and a brief report on early progress both appeared in 1969.

Dear Editor ‘Searching for the future’ (Aslib Proceedings, 42 (5) May 1990) is always an uncertain exercise, which makes it even more important to be clear about the present. I don't know whether the author or the reporter was responsible for the following statements, but they deserve a passing comment. The first reads ‘The use of alternative terms so that “hits” are made on concepts rather than bald terms alone will take this matter far further than the thesaurus approach does now’. Surely, it is free text searching which chases ‘bald terms’; while the thesaurus approach, as detailed in ISO 2788, advocates attempting to work at the conceptual level and to provide a lattice of related concepts to aid the search process.

Using his Information Scientist pseudonym of Icarus, Alan Gilchrist once called the Aslib Co‐ordinate Indexing Group (CIG) (now Aslib Informatics Group) a bunch of free‐thinkers—the hippy fringe of the information profession. As the leading light of this Group (Leo Jolley was its Chairman from its formal inception in 1970 until his death on Christmas Day 1976) one might have expected him to epitomize these alleged qualities, but this was not so. Leo was neither long‐haired, figuratively or otherwise, nor was he a particularly free‐thinker. His work relating to information retrieval tended to be highly formalized: for a time he was unjusdy criticized for his attempt to rigorously define the fundamental nature of feature card systems. Later he had to suffer similar criticism from the present writer when he attempted to define and standardize the vocabulary relating to co‐ordinate indexing and thesaurus construction. Leo was a highly individual thinker, however, and he certainly existed at the fringe of the information profession. His contacts with the profession appear to have been limited to the CIG and to the Classification Research Group. He was neither a member of the Institute of Information Scientists nor of the Library Association, and was affronted if accused of being a librarian. Thus, he formed a part of that limited band who have contributed much to the profession without really being a part of it. This must be qualified, however, in that he had established a company (J. L. Jolley and Partners) which operated a range of services from consultancy to punching holes in feature cards.

I should like to begin with an analogy, which was used originally by Alan Gilchrist in a paper on cost‐effectiveness some years ago. The analogy is repeated almost verbatim because it says precisely what I want to say, better than I could have said it myself.

This paper forms part of the series “60 years of the best in information research”, marking the 60th anniversary of the Journal of Documentation. It aims to review the influence of Brian Vickery's 1971 paper, “Structure and function in retrieval languages”. The paper is not an update of Vickery's work, but a comment on a greatly changed environment, in which his analysis still has much validity.

A commentary on selected literature illustrates the continuing relevance of Vickery's ideas.

Generic survey and specific reference are still the main functions of retrieval languages, with minor functional additions such as relevance ranking. New structures are becoming increasingly significant, through developments such as XML. Future development in artificial intelligence hold out new prospects still.

The paper shows the continuing relevance of “traditional” ideas of information science from the 1960s and 1970s.

Five leading abstracts services in the field of documentation were inspected. A measure of their coverage was obtained by matching the items of a bibliography against each service. All abstracts published by these services in 1964 were counted and ranked to estimate the scope of each service, to identify key journals and to assess the language problem. Leading journals were also identified by counts of citations following articles in nine leading documentation journals, mostly over a five‐year period. These citations were ranked in the same way as the abstracts in order to further identify key journals and to provide another view of the language barrier.