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Computers are being used more and more to control production operations and provide accurate data for management decisions. The key factor is the software system and at BL's Solihull factory Autoroute has been introduced to control the assembly and test of Land Rover 5‐bearing engines.

ALTHOUGH you are reading a professional journal, you may be interested in the impressions of a semi‐outsider, one who has teetered on the edge of the maelstrom of modern librarianship without actually having fallen in—yet. The experience may even be salutary; who knows?

THIS number of THE LIBRARY WORLD returns to the question of foreign literature in British Libraries. The insistence in recent years upon two foreign languages at least, as a qualification for a librarian, has had some good results; but they are Still inadequate in extent. Every librarian must be painfully aware of the handicap we British people suffer in our average inability to converse in any language but our own; no other race is quite so restricted. A Swiss, for example, does not ask if we can speak this or that language, but asks, “In what language shall we speak together?”—a vastly different thing. It is not because of any lack of power to learn; it is merely our unwillingness or lack of opportunity to do so. Such attitudes are anachronisms to‐day; peoples get so much closer every hour, and it must be clear to all who think that one place in a town where a foreigner should be able to ask an intelligent question and receive an answer in his own tongue is the library.

DESPITE the critics who arise to condemn the onward march of the Public Library movement there can be little doubt that after the settling process has been gone through it will be more seriously reckoned with as a factor within our social evolution than at present; and meantime it were well to remember that fine definition of Dickens in regard to the Public Libraries of fifty years ago, and to see whether it was a prophecy or a realisation when he said, “It is grand to know that … the immortal mechanism of God's own hand, the mind, is not forgotten in the din and uproar, but is lodged and tended in a palace of its own.” Let us extend the meaning and see how the Public Library movement has grafted itself upon the mind of the great public by whom it is supported, and how it stands in regard to the authorities by whom it is controlled, and then, taking this position, let us ask the two questions: “How does it express itself popularly, and do people look at it in the light which Dickens did?”