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Je vous entretiendrai de ce qui tient lieu en France de politique de l'information. Je pense en réalité qu'il s'agit plutôt d'une non‐politique de l'information et je vais tenter de vous expliquer pourquoi. Il faut pour cela d'abord caractériser la situation qui prévaut en France en matière d'information.

This document is only a first attempt at providing a brief description of the official publications of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. In order to repair the omissions and errors in this survey, it would be necessary to send a questionnaire to the various administrations, which would enable us to fill in some considerable gaps in administrative information.

As every librarian knows only too well, there has been in recent years, particularly since the war, a vast increase in the amount of periodical literature published. Scarcely a day passes which does not herald the advent of yet another new title; mercifully for the librarian, many of these are fated to expire prematurely, but a high proportion flourish and live to form an important contribution to every conceivable branch of knowledge. As with the periodicals themselves, so with the bibliographical tools which seek to bring some sort of order to this journalistic chaos, until there can be few European countries in which there has been no attempt to undertake at least one of several possible bibliographical enterprises. To enumerate comprehensively every published union‐catalogue, catalogue, bibliography, or press‐guide would itself be a task resulting in the compilation of yet another bibliography of considerable size, while a critical assessment of the value of each such work would be not only impossible but verging on the impertinent. Each has been compiled with a special purpose in view, and the fact that an individual foreign publication may be of little practical use to the British librarian does not necessarily detract from its value in its native country.

Avant‐propos sous les auspices de l'Institut international de Coopération intellectuelle, paraissait en 1934 le t. I, consacré à l'Europe, du Guide international des Archives. Le questionnaire envoyé à tous les États européens comportait sous les points 4 et 6 les questions suivantes: ‘Existe‐t‐il un guide général pour les diverses catégories d'Archives ou des guides particuliers pour l'une ou l'autre d'entre elles?’ et ‘Existe‐t‐il des catalogues imprimés, des publications tant officielles que privées, susceptibles de constituer un instrument complet de référence pour tout ou partie importante des fonds d'archives?’ Les réponses des divers pays à ces questions, malgré leur caractère très inégal, ont fait du Guide international un bon instrument d'information générale sur les Archives. Malheureusement les circonstances ont empêché la publication du volume consacré aux États non européens, tandis que le temps qui s'écoulait tendait à rendre périmés les renseignements fournis sur les Archives européennes.

OUR theme in general this month is the personality of the librarian. One may say that librarians have a habit of discussing the recruitment of the profession, its pay and other factors in the personnel. And it is natural that they should have, because after all it is their life. The librarian as a man rarely figures at any length or in any detail in the books or magazines that we usually read. Lately, it is true, Mr. L. Stanley Jast has been contributing to a contemporary, The Library Review, some admirable all‐too‐brief articles on his memories of personalities and doings mainly in connection with the Library Association thirty or more years since. It is a pity that Mr. Jast cannot be persuaded to give these reminiscences at much greater length, and although it is possible that their main appeal is to the born librarian, yet for those who read as they run, they possess many things of quite living interest. In short, the librarian is bound to be interested in the librarian himself; that is human nature.

Describes interlending activities in French academic libraries. Explains their use of new technologies including electronic document delivery and electronic mail. Charging policies are discussed and a list of specialised resource centres is provided.

Condorcet's is not a name that figures prominently in histories of classification systems; even in Samurin's monumental and comprehensive work—apart from a reference to the influence of his ideas on the system developed by the ‘Institut National des Sciences et Arts’—he is only mentioned in footnotes. Samurin claims that Condorcet's ideas on classification were of a high standard for his period and that the system of the Institut National influenced many nineteenth and twentieth century schemes. However, no reference is made in his or, as far as I have been able to ascertain, in any other history of classification to the technique to which Condorcet made a passing reference in the final chapter of the Esquisse d'un Tableau Historique des Progrès de l'Esprit Humain and which is described in a manuscript in the possession of the Bibliotheque Nationale. This essay entitled ‘Example des methodes techniques’ was published, together with an introductory article on ‘An Unpublished Essay of Condorcet on Technical Methods of Classification’, by K. M. Baker in Annals of Science. Baker is mainly concerned with Condorcet's ideas on the nature of scientific method and with the uses of the technique he described for the framing and testing of hypotheses. Condorcet insisted that his technique was more than a method which allows for the ordering and subsequent retrieval of scientific information. It had a more fundamental utility: that of arranging objects methodically in such a way that the characteristics of each could be related to those of all in whatever way the researcher wished.

The French, and increasingly French libraries, are online on the networks. French print publishing is in trouble. Online full text is one of the promising developments in the forefront of network development. Despite some small but stubborn problems such as copyright and pricing, online full text may represent a way out of their problems for the publishers. One new Minitel service and the general direction of the largest French publisher may indicate an impending marriage of the two sets of problems, and of their possibilities.

The trajectory of François Perroux across the Vichy regime poses about all possible range of methodological issues to the historian of ideas: individual versus collective biography, ideational versus ideological reading, internal versus external analysis, etc. The chapter outlines key elements about Perroux’s trajectory showing the entanglements and boundaries of science and politics in the transition from democratic to authoritarian rule and vice versa. A particular emphasis on uncertainties and adjustments shows, against the tendency to a teleological explanation induced by a linear interpretation of his career, that different paths were considered by Perroux, but that his choices were nevertheless constrained by the forces of both the scientific and political fields.