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UNESCO is instructed by its constitution to ‘Maintain, increase and diffuse knowledge … by initiating methods of international co‐operation calculated to give the peoples of all countries access to the printed and published materials produced by any of them’. As one of the methods of carrying out this function the programmes of Unesco both for 1947 and 1948 specifically included plans to ‘facilitate the improvement of scientific documentation and abstracting’, and an Expert Committee on Scientific Abstracting was called together at Unesco House in Paris during the 7th, 8th, and 9th of April 1948, under the joint authority of the Libraries and Natural Science sections, for preliminary work in connexion with an international conference to be held at a later date.

The recently published Inventory of abstracting and indexing services produced in the UK provides a considerable amount of both ‘hard’ and indicative data from which some general trends in the development of abstracting and indexing services can be deduced. A study of these trends was undertaken and the findings have just been published in the BLRDD report series. This paper presents, in a summary of those findings, information about the size, longevity, ownership and scope of such services.

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.

This paper is concerned with the purpose of functions of abstracting and abstracting services, touching on indexing only in relation to the indexing of abstracts, and concentrating mainly on ‘hard copy’ printed services. It is presented from the viewpoint of both a producer of an abstracting service and a user of other peoples' abstracting services.

A statistical analysis is made of the professional literature of librarians and information scientists in an attempt to uncover the patterns of information flow and to evaluate the abstracting services provided for information workers. Citation analysis of some English language information science journals throws light on the principal sources used by British and American information scientists and the linguistic and national biases in the citations given. The growth of the subject matter published in the field of information science is displayed. Five abstracting services are evaluated. Their scope in terms of the language, country of origin, subject matter and format of the material selected and abstracted is determined. Coverage is assessed in comparison with three bibliographies in this subject area. Currency is determined from NRLSI acquisition dates. Key journals are found from productivity analysis of the abstracted journals. Conclusions are drawn as to the adequacy of the present services and suggestions made for possible improvements.

Computer‐based information services covering major disciplines of science have been developed recently from certain traditional abstracting and indexing services. A wide range of secondary information services is provided to satisfy the various information requirements generated by the present complexity of scientific and technological work. This development has caused radical changes in the administration structure, pricing policies and funding of the organizations providing information services.

Describes abstracting and indexing services for science and technology produced in India. Analyses the services with respect to such aspects as frequency, nature of publications covered, chronological development, and subject coverage. Concludes that most of the services are selective and that engineering and technology are better covered than are pure sciences. Recommends that the coverage of these services should be broader‐based, if anything approaching total bibliographic control of scientific and technical literature in India is to be achieved.

This article is concerned with services providing information about management (e.g. personnel practices, the use of management techniques) rather than the broader area of information for management. The manager's need for information services is examined by reference to actual enquiries put by managers in their daily work. The present state of documentation services (e.g. books, periodicals, abstracting and indexing services, guides to research) is examined, together with the various kinds of libraries providing information services on management. Finally, reasons for the non‐use of existing services by managers are examined and suggestions are made for the removal of these obstacles.

This compilation of over 500 United States Government bibliographies is the second annual supplement to BIBLIOGRAPHY OF UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT BIBLIOGRAPHIES 1968–1973 (Pierian Press). Due to the Government Printing Office backlog during 1974, many 1973 and 1974 titles are included in this 1975 Supplement, which should have appeared earlier.

The growth of CAS‐IAS (current alerting service — individual article supply) services in the 1990s has not delivered the rapid benefits expected by information practitioners. This article focuses on the alerting aspects of CAS‐IAS services and documents the results of a series of surveys carried out at a UK cancer research institute over a four year period. By the first quarter of 1997, in over 50% of cases in a sample group of titles the shelf issue was more current, or as current, as the alerting services. The article also includes a mid‐1997 overview of the CAS‐IAS services available and lists factors to be considered by information practitioners in any evaluation of the document delivery aspect of CAS‐IAS services. The conclusion is that the monitoring of service developments and their performance will have to continue for the foreseeable future.