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The paper looks at issues and trends in the building of a learning organisation for the coming century. There is initial consideration of the concept of the “hybrid library”, a phrase descriptive of the current evolutionary stage as perceived by British academic libraries, and some analysis of what this implies for the future skills requirement of information workers. Mechanisms for ensuring cyclic training and development are described, principally addressing the concepts of investment in people and organisational culture; here there is an exploration of externally administered formal schemes to assess commitment, planning, action and evaluation in relation to training programmes, the effectiveness of which is judged in terms of meeting business goals; and gauge cultural awareness within an organisation. Finally, there is some consideration of the leadership role of the library and information service director, including the availability of preparatory and ongoing leadership training.

Haworth Press, the well known publishers in the library and information science field, have recently cottoned on to an interesting idea: devote a special issue of one of their journals to a special theme, and at the same time produce a hardback book, reasonably priced, that reproduces the articles. The idea is to appeal to a market other than the libraries that will typically subscribe to the Haworth journals. Success depends upon the collection of chapters forming a coherent whole. This book, reproduced from a special issue of The Reference Librarian, partly succeeds. The 150 page hardback book comprises seven articles, from five different authors (two authors supply two articles each) with an editor's introduction. The articles are fairly typical journal articles, reporting research results; some could easily have graced the pages of Online and CD‐ROM Review. The articles vary somewhat in length and style, but generally either review the literature of a particular topic, or describe some recent research work. The title is somewhat misleading, as the book is NOT comprehensive; a better subtitle would have been ‘Aspects of Use and User Behavior’.

The BIDS service has evolved into a public/private sector alliance, with the University of Bath and ingenta teaming up.

AS A RESULT of present economic problems in Britain and attendant cuts in spending, there is a need to achieve maximum cost‐effectiveness in all sectors of public spending including libraries. This article examines a simple method by which economies could be made in buying multiple copies of books. It is assumed that unless librarians have freedom to buy a single copy of any book they choose, they will not achieve the breadth and depth required of first‐class libraries, be they in the public sector or in academic institutions. Perhaps second copies need cause little concern, but a pilot survey of a polytechnic library revealed cases where as many as four, six or even eight copies of the same edition had been bought on one occasion before the effectiveness of a lesser purchase could have been evaluated.