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The issue of doctors in management in the NHS is discussed and a model showing how these two key groups can work together most effectively and deal with potential conflict is offered. Four medical management styles, three management styles and three medical managerial structures are identified. When integrated into a matrix the best combinations of structure, medical and management styles can be identified. It is noted that there are only seven combinations that are likely to prove effective and that these should be taken into account when designing organisation structure in the NHS.

A broad consensus seems to have emerged over the last five to ten years about the processes that characterise organisations that have performed well in the rapidly changing 1980s. These ‘excellent’ organisations have much to teach the British National Healtli Service. This paper considers how the Service can learn from them and adapt the lessons to its own situation. It will suggest that resource management could help to move the culture of the Health Service in the right direction, but that unfortunately it could also become an arid bureaucratic exercise in data collection. To encourage managers and professionals to use resource management to develop a culture of organisational excellence, it includes some questions that they could ask themselves as they consider its implementation. Favourable answers to these questions will give cause for optimism that resource management will be used to help the Service to provide more excellent patient care.

This chapter outlines opportunities for designing place-based or localized social media services and technologies for tourist settings. Following an exploration of how ephemeral, collaborative social networks emerge, consideration is given to understanding tourist places in terms of networking and socialization. In the field of information technology design, there are many examples of experimental mobile, location-based services that provide informational overplays for tourism sites and generally seem to merely replicate the functions of guidebooks or online information services. However, viewing the performance of tourism through a lens that emphasizes place-making as a social practice could inspire the innovation and design of new mobile social technologies to enrich tourist places and interactions.

WE offer our readers again our best wishes for the joy that appropriately belongs to Christmas. The happy festival comes at the close of one of the most fruitful and useful years in library history: a year which has seen wide developments—not, indeed, in the establishment of new libraries, though these have not been wanting (the last month of the year, for example, has seen Lord Elgin open the new library at Hendon), but in a drawing together of existing organizations, the creation of a really new Library Association, and a degree of co‐operation which thirty years ago would have seemed difficult.

THIS month is that in which librarians of public libraries are concerned with budgets. In spite of occasional croakings, it is fair to say that the worst of the crisis is over, and, if prosperity is not here, it is at least on the way. It will be interesting to learn if the cuts which some libraries had to make in their appropriations will be continued this year. Libraries have demonstrated beyond disproof that they have played a part in the depression in raising some of the gloom from the minds of the people, and can make reasonable claim to have financial consideration of the fact. Fortunately, in our worst times, the grotesque cutting which public libraries in the United States were called to endure was not suffered here.

IT IS BY direction of NLW'S Subscription Department—to whom I have the good fortune to have been married for nigh on 16 years—that I open my first column of the new year with a lot of gubbins about subscriptions and their administration. Do please read it and, if appropriate, take action, or I'll never hear the end of it.

DEAR SIR,—Failing being able to provide a really well equipped Reference Library, does it not seem a pity to waste the few funds at the disposal of the average public librarian in a desperate attempt to provide a collection of local books, with the forlorn hope of stimulating interest in the department, or in buying a handful of standard reference works for the benefit of those “serious” readers who frequent the library?