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The purpose of this paper is to identify the influential agents that led to the successful acceptance and diffusion of the Concerto clinical workstation at the Northern District Health Board.

The paper draws on Rogers’ diffusion of innovation theory to interpret and analyse the factors that enabled acceptance and successful implementation of the innovative Concerto clinical workstation.

The authors conclude that human factors (clinicians) and non-human factors (the software package) simultaneously influenced the ready acceptance of the innovation. The reason for the positive acceptance and full diffusion of Concerto as compared to iHealth is the increased functionality it offers and its ability to provide clinicians with comprehensive patient records over a period of time, which assists in making informed decisions regarding the treatment, discharge, hospitalisation and recommendations for the future well-being of patients.

The study focused on only one district health board (DHB); therefore, the outcomes may not be representative of all DHBs.

The study has practical implications for clinicians, DHB members and public health regulators. The outcomes illuminate the “agents” that positively influenced the diffusion of Concerto. The regulators and the DHBs can use this as a benchmark to determine how to lead the successful diffusion of information technology (IT) innovation in the public health sector.

The impact on society is evident in the paper, as the use of an innovation, such as Concerto, saves time taken by clinicians to make more informed decisions regarding their patient care.

This study contributes to new knowledge by investigating the diffusion process of IT innovation with an intention of establishing the factors that enabled this process.

The assessing of the specific absorption rate (SAR) of living organisms or phantoms is difficult to realize and this paper seeks to do this. SAR much more precisely describes the energy absorbed by biological objects than values of electric field strength (E [V/m]) or power density (S [W/m²]) measured at the point of exposition. However, for living objects the assessing of SAR is not an easy task by measuring methods or even in calculation evaluations. Numerical techniques, especially the finite‐difference time‐domain method (FDTD), offer different possibilities of calculations. The important problem with FDTD method introduced to lossy objects with complex shapes is that this method is not verified with the measuring data.

In this work the results of calculations and measuring data of ellipsoidal phantoms filled with specimen of electrical parameters like muscle tissue are presented. The calculations of SAR have been realized for two cases, e.g. for plane wave incident and for waveguide condition. Measurements for verifying the obtained data were done by waveguide method. The comparison of numerical (the package CONCERTO (Vector Fields Ltd)) and measurement methods were done at frequencies 900 and 1,800 MHz.

Calculations of SAR of lossy objects by FDTD method have been confirmed by measurements and analytical method of calculations. This documents that the package CONCERTO (Vector Fields Ltd) (Concerto User Guide) can be used for such calculations.

This paper presents the results of calculations of SAR of ellipsoidal phantoms filled with specimens of electrical parameters of equivalent muscle tissue.

Developing a collection of compact disc sound recordings is beginning to emerge as a goal for many libraries, yet the commitment of resources and energy involved in this effort is not to be taken lightly. In addition to the inevitable practical problems to be solved, there is the rare responsibility of constructing a collection from the ground up, an enterprise particularly challenging with a new medium. Satisfying both patron needs and staff requirements is seldom easy; the task of choosing CD's therefore requires careful thought, planning, and monitoring.

I HAVE sometimes been asked whether I am conscious, as the present editor of THE LIBRARY WORLD, of the spirit and influence of its founder, James Duff Brown, and of his editorial successors, who included J. D. Stewart and W. C. Berwick Sayers. The answer is that of course I am—how could it be otherwise?

THE process of setting up the new Polytechnics initiated by the White Paper of May, 1966 entitled “A Plan for Polytechnics and other Colleges” is now approaching completion. Of the 30 Polytechnics proposed 14 have now been established and practically all the others should be in operation by next September. All of them embrace one or more Colleges of Technology. Colleges of Art, Building and Commerce are also involved and, in two cases, Colleges of Education.

LOCAL history achieved academic respectability in 1947 with the establishment of the Department of Local History at the University of Leicester. No longer need the local historian feel ashamed of his craft or regard himself as a writer of footnotes to another's history.

The following proposals for cataloguing are based upon the practical treatment of gramophone records, arrived at by experiment, test, and revision in the only library in England that can claim to be of national scope in the sense, mutatis mutandis, in which that term can be applied to the British Museum, that is, the British Broadcasting Corporation's Gramophone Library, and the illustrations have been provided from its catalogue by courtesy of the Corporation. Time, and a seven days a week service extended to all departments and locations of the B.B.C. have imposed a few modifications, but after ten years the general principles stand as they were evolved during the war, when demands of service were greater and more exacting than ever before, and they have been able to accommodate the greatest and most far‐reaching change in commercial‐record history—the invention of the slow‐speed, long‐playing record, which came upon the market only after the war was over.

I suppose that most noticeable of all the changes in our profession since I came into it has been the multiplicity of the methods by which one can become a librarian. A. E. Standley says in a recent article in the L.A.R., in 1970: “The term librarian includes the Library Association chartered librarian, the graduate with a degree in librarianship, the scholar librarian, the information and intelligence officer, the translator, the abstracter, the non‐library‐qualified subject expert”.

FOR ME PERSONALLY, The library world has completed a circle in the last decade. From 1958 to 1962 I was concerned in its publication, first with Grafton & Co, and then with André Deutsch Ltd. When Sydney Hyde of WHS Advertising Ltd told me in December that the journal would not fit into their proposed re‐organisation, sentiment alone would probably have been sufficient to arouse my interest in acquiring it.