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Miss Barbara R. F. Kyle has been appointed Research Librarian of Aslib and, in succession to Miss E. M. R. Ditmas, Managing Editor of the Journal of Documentation. She will join the Aslib staff on 24th June. Barbara Kyle is at present Assistant Director of the National Book League, which appointment she has held since 1958. After wide experience in public libraries she was, for ten years, Librarian of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Since 1955, thanks to grants from both the Nuffield Foundation and the United States National Science Foundation, she has drafted and is testing a classification for social sciences. She is a member of the Unesco International Advisory Committee for Bibliography, Documentation, and Terminology, and a Vice‐President of the International Federation for Documentation. For many years she has taken an active interest in Aslib affairs. She was elected to the Council in 1949 and has since given her services as Chairman of the Conference and Meetings Committee (1950–51), Honorary Secretary (1951–55), Chairman of Council (1955–57), Chairman of the International Relations Committee (1957–61), Chairman of the Research Committee (1961–62), and has served also on the Education and the Executive and Finance Committees.

The last CRG Bulletin, no. 7, dealt only with the practical application of four faceted special classifications.

Catalogues of special libraries are primarily finding tools, and not repositories of exemplary cataloguing. Author and name entries, no less than subject entries, should be evaluated from the point of view of information retrieval. Multiple entries on unit cards generously used may well be justified not only on grounds of efficiency but also on grounds of economy. Stationery, duplicating, and space for extra cards are often cheaper than man‐hours spent in thinking, argument, and fruitless searches. Entries for periodical articles should not be separated from the main catalogue. Series entries in numerical order should include reasons for any deliberately excluded items. A study is made of two possible inquiries and of how far author and name entries may usefully be made for ‘sponsors’ as well as authors of publications. The use of agreed abbreviations is advocated as an economy. Biographee entries should be made in the author catalogue for studies of the work of specialist organizations. Use of book‐reviews for finding critiques of works of such organizations is suggested. Case studies of actual searches should form the basis in compiling a cataloguing code for special libraries.

The Chairman welcomed delegates on behalf of Aslib. She recalled that at the international conference on classification held some years before at Dorking, there had been a permanent air of intellectual euphoria. Nobody had gone to bed. If as much interest were aroused on this occasion, delegates must remember that they could not do in two or three hours what had proved impossible to do in a week, including nights, at Dorking. Dorking had been a particularly fruitful conference. Some of the members, writing on classification afterwards, wrote ‘après Dorking’. She did not know whether they would also say ‘après Belgravia’.

Many of us feel that as a result of the Cranfield experiments we ought perhaps to know something that we didn't know before and that this knowledge ought to have some positive effects on our work—the difficulty is to be sure exactly what these effects should be and what we ought to be doing about it, other than acquiring guilt feelings. During the period of the Cranfield experiments I myself have also been engaged, on a less impressive scale, with similar problems in different fields of knowledge.

The ASM Information Retrieval System is currently in process of redesign to incorporate major refinements and improvements resulting from five years of operating experience as well as experience and research of others in the field. Principles and methodology underlying these changes are explored for various components of this system, principally vocabulary, links and roles, and computer hardware and programming. The major change is from semantic code to thesaurus as the system vocabulary, and the relative efficiencies and inherent capabilities of each are compared and related to the general principles of vocabulary control.

WE write on the eve of an Annual Meeting of the Library Association. We expect many interesting things from it, for although it is not the first meeting under the new constitution, it is the first in which all the sections will be actively engaged. From a membership of eight hundred in 1927 we are, in 1930, within measurable distance of a membership of three thousand; and, although we have not reached that figure by a few hundreds—and those few will be the most difficult to obtain quickly—this is a really memorable achievement. There are certain necessary results of the Association's expansion. In the former days it was possible for every member, if he desired, to attend all the meetings; today parallel meetings are necessary in order to represent all interests, and members must make a selection amongst the good things offered. Large meetings are not entirely desirable; discussion of any effective sort is impossible in them; and the speakers are usually those who always speak, and who possess more nerve than the rest of us. This does not mean that they are not worth a hearing. Nevertheless, seeing that at least 1,000 will be at Cambridge, small sectional meetings in which no one who has anything to say need be afraid of saying it, are an ideal to which we are forced by the growth of our numbers.

THE Fifty‐First Conference of the Library Association takes place in the most modern type of British town. Blackpool is a typical growth of the past fifty years or so, rising from the greater value placed upon the recreations of the people in recent decades. It has the name of the pleasure city of the north, a huge caravansary into which the large industrial cities empty themselves at the holiday seasons. But Blackpool is more than that; it is a town with a vibrating local life of its own; it has its intellectual side even if the casual visitor does not always see it as readily as he does the attractions of the front. A week can be spent profitably there even by the mere intellectualist.

The Question Master for this session was Miss Mildred Couldrey. The Panel of Experts included Mr. D. V. Arnold (I.C.I., Ltd., Paints Division), Miss Ruth Jacobs (Department of Scientific and Industrial Research), Miss Barbara Kyle (Royal Institute of International Affairs), Mr. F. A. Sharr (Manchester Public Libraries), and Mr. E. N. Simons (Edgar Allen & Co., Ltd.).

As her many friends and colleagues all over the world already know, Barbara Kyle retired prematurely at the end of June from her twin posts on the staff of Aslib: Research Librarian and Editor of this Journal. Thus ill health has interrupted a career of singular éclat in the realm of librarianship and imposed a burden of rest and recuperation on one whose capacity for living is everywhere a legend. And ‘everywhere’, it must be said, contains in this context no hint of poetic licence, for rarely can the British documentalist abroad have engaged in converse with his colleagues without the name of Kyle being mentioned with respect, admiration, or personal affection—frequently the rare tribute of all three.