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Reference services policies and procedures — we all have them. The question is, how are these policies recorded and organized for the use of the staff and the public we serve. Most reference departments have collections of memoranda, minutes, and individual policy statements, more or less organized in binders at the reference desk, and revised in a more or less systematic fashion. In exceptional cases there are detailed manuals of reference services policies and procedures which are periodically revised.

Imagine you are working at the reference desk of a major university library on a busy weekday afternoon. As you say, “How may I help you?” to your next client, you notice that he is wearing a high school letterman's jacket and is sporting fuzz on his upper lip that he would proudly call a mustache.

I first met punched feature cards in 1956. I was working as an assistant to E. G. Brisch, whose company classified the materials and components used in industry. His method brought similar articles together, both notionally in classified codebooks and practically when the classified items were stored in their code number order. The result was an excellent aid to variety reduction, standardization, and stock control. E. G. gave me a good grounding in analytical classification; but his office held other secrets too. One of these was a sort of punched card representing a property or quality, not an object or event as with all other punched cards I had met. On these other cards, notched or slotted for hand‐sorting with needles, or punched and verified in thousands for reading by machine, the holes stood for characteristics possessed by the item concerned. The new cards were different. Since they represented properties, the items possessing these had to be shown by the holes, and so they were. E. G. named them ‘Brisch‐a‐boo’: this I found was his special variant of ‘peek‐a‐boo’, a title by which they are still occasionally known. To stack some of them in exact register with each other is to find, as a set of through holes in numbered positions, the reference numbers of all the items recorded on them which have the qualities concerned.

All items listed may be borrowed from the Aslib Library, except those marked, which may be consulted in the Library.

All items listed may be borrowed from the Aslib Library, except those marked, which may be consulted in the Library.

THERE are no motions of ultimate importance to be submitted to the Library Association Annual General Meeting this year. That which, if passed, is to provide that the President shall be installed in office at the opening of the Annual Conference in itself is merely a domestic or internal Association matter. As we have argued in THE LIBRARY WORLD such an arrangement would give a more dramatic and dignified opening to the President's year; he would be installed by the outgoing President in the presence of the largest assembly that the members can make in body; indeed on the only occasion in a normal year in which he sees and is seen by a full meeting; instead as now rising to take charge of us and to make his most important address as unobtrusively as an ordinary member at a time when his term is almost over. It is a better entry for him and for us, as a spectacle and demonstration, than a small January induction on a cold and usually wet evening at Chaucer House attended at best by not more than a hundred members.

This new measure of consumer law of some forty‐odd sections, a short Act by present standards but as far‐reaching as any legislation since the war, establishes a code of conduct in commerce and trade which few will be able to ignore, from the manufacturer down to the counter‐hand. Operative from November 30th of this year, traders will require to urgently consider their sales practices, advertising, labelling and their trade descriptions; sales staff will need to be instructed in their new responsibilities. The new law is not just for consumer‐retailer transactions, but extends to trade between different branches of all trades, so that a retailer will be protected against misleading descriptions and misrepresentations by a manufacturer and the latter against misdescriptions of ingredients or components.

The purpose of this editorial is to provide an overview of the wider debates concerning the evolution of work‐life balance practice and policy since the onset of the “Great Recession” of 2008 and to draw out some comparisons of the issues raised by the papers in the special issue by focusing particularly on the example of the UK.

The editorial analyses how the direction and pace of changes in work‐life balance practice and policy varies between different national contexts and welfare regimes and also asks whether, within the same national context, the changes taking place are always consistent.

The special issue draws together an international overview of work‐life balance measures which focuses particularly on measures for fathers, an EU‐wide analysis of the use of flexible employment and its relationship with work‐family conflict and a number of specific country case studies from Southern Europe where recession has been particularly severe (Spain and Italy) and the Southern hemisphere (Australia) where the recession has been less deep. It finds that economic crisis and austerity have resulted in a variety of labour market changes and policy responses in different national settings, some but not all of which map onto existing welfare regime typologies. The articles raise a wider set of questions about what type of policy best promotes employees' work‐life balance. The editorial argues in favour of legislative support for work‐life balance to help address structural inequalities.

This editorial and special issue is one of the first to review the small but growing literature on the effect of recession on individuals' experience of work‐life balance, organisations' approach to work‐life balance and reconciliation policy since 2008.

A frame is an interpretive scheme of meanings that guide participants’ interpretations of social interaction and their actions in social situations (Goffman, 1974). By identifying early-career physicians’ identity and relationship frames, this study aims to produce information about socially constructed ways to interpret leadership communication in a medical context.

The data consist of essays written by young physicians (n = 225) during their specialization training and workplace learning period. The analysis was conducted applying constructive grounded theory.

Three identity and relationship frames were identified: the expertise frame, the collegial frame and the system frame. These frames arranged the meanings of being a physician in a leader-follower relationship differently.

The findings suggest that identity questions discussed recently in medical leadership studies can be partly answered with being aware of and understanding socially constructed and somewhat contradictory frames.