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As Nicholas Barker has pointed out, concern with the problem of deteriorating books has a long history. In 1898 the Prefect of the Vatican Library convened an international conference in St Gall to consider the decay of paper, in particular the new cheaper papers produced from wood pulp. Thereafter a number of libraries established conservation laboratories and the Bodleian monitored tests of the efficacy of different methods of treating paper. An even earlier concern for conservation is noted by Alex Wilson. In the Abbey of Admont the librarian's task was laid down in 1370 as

ANDRE DEUTSCH has sold his library science imprint Grafton Books, which he acquired in 1961 along with the services of myself, to Gower Press.

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.

… Strange but true facts, number 7: Wandsworth is famous for more than its blue halo.

THE WELCOME NEWS, late in November, that the government has finally given the go‐ahead to the first phase of building the new British Library headquarters at Somers Town next to St Pancras railway station has reawakened the campaign by Professor Hugh Thomas and others to retain the Reading Room at the British Museum as the BL'S centre‐point. Professor Thomas wants the new building to be merely a warehouse for the book collections, and to have books ferried down to readers at Great Russell Street on demand.

Containing as it does many of the finest books published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Garrison Library of Gibraltar is no ordinary services' library. Its founding was due to that perceptive Captain (later Colonel) John Drinkwater, author of one of the most famous histories of the Great Siege of Gibraltar which lasted from 1779–1783, the History of the late siege (Spilsbury, 1785). Having suffered from a lack of reading material during the siege, Colonel Drinkwater saw the need for a good circulating library and club as a means of saving the officers of the garrison from “having their minds enervated and vitiated by dissipitation”. His appeal for books, shortly after the seige, attracted nearly 500 gifts which enabled the library to open pending the arrival of the 674 volumes on order from London, there being no bookshop in Gibraltar at that time.

WITH the approach of the European Management Conference at Torquay and the news that The Work Study Society will be holding a one‐day Conference in London on October 14th and another in Hereford on November 25th it looks as if work study men will have plenty of opportunities of exchanging points of view this autumn.

Some libraries and information services are quite definitely user‐centred; some think they are but are not always; some seem to be designed for librarians rather than users. The purpose of this monograph is to encourage the development of libraries to meet the perceived needs of users — I hope it will be found useful by librarians and information workers as well as by students.