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As a follow‐up to a study carried out in 1984 of the constraints upon curriculum development in Schools of Librarianship and Information Science (SLIS), the British Library Research and Development Department (BLR&DD) commissioned a survey of other types of ‘information education’ in the United Kingdom. It was hoped, thereby, to recognise new challenges and opportunities for SLIS and whether serious competition was to be expected from other educational provision. There were some difficulties in recognising and categorising information education programmes. Most were found to be technology‐based with little interest in the user dimension of information provision. Those with such an interest had problems in securing resource provision. SLIS did not appear to be seriously threatened by other information education provision in their traditional roles as providers of personnel for institutionally based information activities. Credibility as providers of information technology‐based programmes required SLIS to develop radically different course programmes with substantial additional resourcing. The poor public image of library and information work and the lack of coherent measures to tackle this imply that SLIS will continue to have difficulty in securing the resource base to compete effectively in the information technology field.

Ever since William Wordsworth extolled the “bliss of solitude” some 175 years ago, it has become increasingly difficult to find a “desert island” in the original sense of the phrase — that is, an island that is really deserted or abandoned. At any rate, no such luck for me. Even after engaging in the most arduous reference work in order to find some truly get‐away‐from‐everybody place where I could be alone to think my big thoughts, I discovered that my hopes for splendid isolation were to be dashed wholly. There on the shore of remote Mudge Island, as I dragged my rowboat up on the beach, I found awaiting me, not clouds and daffodils, but a retinue of reference librarians busily declaiming and disputing over reference resources in behalf of the Reference Services Review!

The Council for National Academic Awards could be said to have been fathered by SPUTNIK I, the first space satellite launched in 1957 by the USSR. This signal achievement, a great shock to Western democracies hitherto convinced of their technical and cultural superiority, induced national soul searching particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. Inevitably such soul searching turned upon the higher education system. If SPUTNIK I was the progenitor of CNAA, Lord Robbins was its midwife. The so called Robbins Report, which examined the structure of higher education in the United Kingdom, concluded that there was need to expand significantly the cadres of qualified manpower available by the expansion of opportunities for university level education. It was recognised by Lord Robbins' Committee of Enquiry that in the areas of professional and specifically vocational higher education the United Kingdom had failed seriously to furnish itself appropriately by its existing patterns of higher education provision.

An investigation was undertaken in early 1984 in fourteen schools of librarianship and information studies (SLIS) in England and Wales. The extent to which information technology (IT) concepts have been incorporated into SLIS syllabuses was studied in conjunction with heads of SLIS and by an examination of their curriculum statements. No differences could be detected as a result of different institutional affiliations in the capacity or desire of SLIS to enter the IT field. Wide variations in the extent and quality of activity in the IT field were observed however from one SLIS to another. Some SLIS are seriously affected by ponderous administrative procedures imposed upon them. All SLIS acknowledge that the traditional market for their graduates is changing but no consensus emerges as to how much and in which directions. Evolutionary rather than revolutionary changes in curricula were expected to be adequate as a coping strategy. It is too early to assess the success of the adaptive responses which have been instituted in most SLIS. Resources—revenue, capital and, especially, staffing expertise are a serious problem for the future in all SLIS.

HOW WORTHWHILE is research in librarianship in the uk at present? Is it making a contribution to the solution of our current problems? If it is making a contribution, is this contribution sufficiently significant in relation to the amount of effort and money expended?

STARING AT all of us in the preamble of the Library Association's Royal Charter is the statement that one of the objects of the association is ‘to unite all persons engaged or interested in library work for the purpose of promoting the best administration of libraries’. Now, whatever else we may have achieved over the last hundred years, we have conspicuously failed in this particular objective. How many experienced librarians with long years of library service behind them are there up and down the country, in government departments, universities and industrial firms, who seem to take a perverse sort of pride in not being members of the association, instead of being safely tucked up with the rest of us? Their number must be legion, and that in itself is an indication of our failure. And how often do they admit, a little shamefacedly, that they really see no relevance in what the Library Association is doing, in relation to their own individual circumstances? And then comes their clincher: besides, they will tell you slightly aggressively, ‘if I joined it would cost me £x’.

AS PART OF a three‐man delegation, with Philip Sewell (as leader) and Eric Clough, to the Soviet Union in May this year under the Anglo‐Soviet cultural agreement, a number of impressions about the nature and current problems of education for librarianship in Russian were gained.

‘EVERY patron of a public library is an individual endowed with free choice. But to what extent is the public library acting as an effective neutraliser of individuality?’

THE ORGANISING COMMITTEE of the British Library was set up in June 1971 following the acceptance in April 1970 by the government of the recommendations of the Dainton Report on the national libraries and the consequent White Paper (Cmnd 4572) in January 1971. The committee is to plan the organisation of the library and develop and co‐ordinate its policy, and is clearly of the greatest importance, not only to the national libraries but to all libraries through the bibliographic and research services the British Library will undertake. What do we know of the work of this committee, which has now been in existence for a year?

BOTH before setting out and since returning from a British Council‐sponsored specialist tour of Finland to look at libraries and library schools and give a series of lectures, friends have been either congratulating my bravery or castigating my foolhardiness in venturing behind the Iron Curtain. Even those few people who seemed aware of the unescapable fact that Finland is not occupied by Russians (or indeed anyone at all across vast, forest‐covered stretches of the country) wondered how I coped with the intense cold and the marauding bears believed to wander unchecked around the unmade streets of the log‐cabin settlements.