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There are two areas of expertise of great importance to the facilities manager – project management and the ability to manage the increasing amount of IT equipment in buildings. New training courses have been devised to address these needs and are described.

Locally based policing ‐ involving co‐operation with local residents and agencies, is a key requirement of the government's police reform agenda. This article reports the findings of an evaluation of one such initiative that involved residents in determining policing strategy on two urban housing estates. On one estate there were positive outcomes, but there was little change in the other. This appeared to be related to the range of skills possessed by the officers on the two sites.

Once established, street sex markets tend to be very resilient. This article describes the factors that generated an initiative to tackle street prostitution in an inner city area, and the tactics employed. Some of the measures were successful to a degree and improved public perceptions of the area but the overall model needs further development to be sustained.

In December 2001 the then Department of Transport, Local Government and the Regions (DTLR but now currently the Office for the Deputy Prime Minister, hereafter referred to as ODPM) issued the tender document it had promised for the review and update of 5/94 Planning Out Crime (Home Office, 1994) The specification was for good practice guidance on planning out crime to be written within 6 months. Notwithstanding this exercise, the writer contends that in the face of the research, literature, legislation and expertise in relation to designing out crime, papers issued by ODPM and the form of the tender document itself demonstrate that it remains uncommitted to many of the accepted principles of design‐against‐crime and to the cross‐cutting crime reduction obligations of the police and local authorities under the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act. The author anticipates that this lack of commitment may be evident in the forthcoming revised planning out crime guidance and suggests possible approaches to this potentially influential document.

UNLIKE SOME of the expenditures necessary to become more efficient, buying a small business system entails many more alternatives to obtain the best value for money. It is important to know what the computer is meant to achieve before buying and to be certain that it fulfils this function after purchase.

CALL IT what you will, serendipity, accident, fortuitous chance, but add it to coincidence and together they will take some beating. This was brought home to me recently when browsing through fifty year old files of The Nation and The Athenaeum. In a vague search for something entirely different my eye was attracted by the heading, ‘The woman librarian’, a somewhat inelegant title to a longish letter to the editor sent by Dr Ernest A Baker on the occasion of a discussion at University College London conducted by Miss Marian Frost. Librarian at Worthing, who was at that time one of the sixteen women chief librarians in the country. And then, the very next day, there appeared in the November issue of NLW a note about the potential qualities of women librarians first published in 1889.

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Tenn. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.

FOR TOO LONG there has been a tendency to adjure librarians to take note of the ‘new media’. There have been large numbers of courses designed to point out to librarians that there are more than books in a library, when for many years this must have been blindingly obvious even to the meanest of intelligences. Present concerns must instead be to accept that we have the media, and to spend more time thinking of how we use them, what we do with them, and who for.