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Let me begin by reassuring you that this paper is not a survey of the literature of the film. The library of the British Film Institute contains just over 10,000 books and pamphlets relating to the film, and even a hasty survey of a body of literature of that size and complexity would occupy us all night. Most of this literature, moreover, falls outside the scope of the bibliography I am compiling on which this paper is based: a bibliography of film librarianship. My subject this evening, therefore, is limited to the literature that deals in some measure with the art, the science, or, if you prefer, the discipline of film librarianship; the collection, organization, and treatment of films in libraries. That there is such a discipline is, I think, warranted by the existence of this group, and if there are still some unbelievers in that great grey sea of librarianship beyond Aslib, I trust the Cataloguing Code that has been so methodically (I almost said painfully) formulated at the fortnightly sessions of your Cataloguing Committee will be fully recognized as the birth certificate of a new and vital branch of the ‘penurious science’.

A regular feature giving news and comments on events and productions in the field of visual aids for technical and scientific teaching and training

The film approach to history in this paper I want to consider the film as source material for history in the sense that palimpsest and parchment, hieroglyph and rune, clay tablet and manorial roll are source materials—fragments, sometimes fragments of fragments, often defaced by time, and applied to purposes of historical reconstruction rarely contemplated by the original authors. For the most part I shall not be particularly concerned with the various philosophies of history—whether it is the job of the historian to lay material dispassionately before the student so that he can make up his own mind about what happened in the past, or to digest source material in order to arrive at the truth—that is, what the historian may hope is the whole incontrovertible real truth, or to digest source material, as Macaulay and Carlyle digested it, in order to justify something in contemporary life or thought. All that need be said here for the moment is that films can be used, as other historical source material can be used, for various and different historical purposes.

Before documentation became his primary interest, Robert Fairthorne would conventionally have been described as an applied mathematician. Such a description, however, does not give a true indication of his special abilities. He is, in fact, dedicated to the task of bringing to science and engineering the benefits of mathematics in all its forms, and to him such classifications as ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ were mere irrelevancies.

The Thirtieth Aslib Annual Conference was held at the Norbreck Hydro, Blackpool, from 23rd to 26th September, 1955, and proved to be as enjoyable as any in previous years although, as was to be expected, the number of those attending was somewhat lower than last year, when the Conference took place in London.

Sir Raymond Streat, C.B.E., Director of The Cotton Board, Manchester, accompanied by Lady Streat. A Vice‐President: F. C. Francis, M.A., F.S.A., Keeper of the Department of Printed Books, British Museum. Honorary Treasurer: J.E.Wright. Honorary Secretary: Mrs. J. Lancaster‐Jones, B.Sc., Science Librarian, British Council. Chairman of Council: Miss Barbara Kyle, Research Worker, Social Sciences Documentation. Director: Leslie Wilson, M.A.

Mass‐observation as a word was first used (without the hyphen) in the New Statesman and Nation at the beginning of 1937 when we published letters about this idea; and from the beginning we really meant what we said. It is worth having a look at the word itself, because its meaning has altered somewhat over the years. By ‘Observation’, we meant, of course, observing; and by observing, inferentially, we meant primarily observing by eye, looking at situations—though also by nose, ear, touch, using all of one's senses in fact. We did not mean, in the first place, simply asking people questions. We wanted to observe what they did, not what they said they did. In those days, any attempt to study society as it really was in England was certainly pioneering, in a way that it is difficult to remember now. The Gallup Poll had just started and was treated with a good deal of caution, as is the case again at the moment! The whole idea was novel in those days. But what captured people's interest in our case was the idea of observing. I have not changed my ideas about this, alas, though I have changed many of my other ideas in the last third of a century.

Miss Elizabeth Petree has been appointed Administrative Assistant to the Director of Aslib, and joined the staff in November. Miss Petree was Deputy Secretary of the College of General Practitioners from 1954 to 1964. She was earlier employed at the Royal Institute of International Affairs.

When a film is being made a much greater footage of material is exposed than is required for the final production. The ratio varies from four to one to fifteen or twenty to one. The former would apply to a rigidly scripted film where each shot can be exactly specified and prearranged, the latter to a film where the action is unpredictable and cannot be planned, as, for example, in filming racing of any kind.

The general theory of the clastic behaviour of a conventional single‐cell wing stiffened with swept ribs (or stringers) has been dcvclopcd. It was shown that the swept members introduce a measure of skewness in the structural geometry of the wing which cause the wing to twist, as well as bend, under simple bending loads. This note shows that, if the sweepback angle is not more than 35 deg., it is possible to make a wing aero‐isoclinic by introducing swept stringers.