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At the dining room table in a modest house in Sonyea, New York, Bohdan Wynar and David Parish worked to edit the latter's manuscript on state government publications. The now‐well‐known publishing firm, Libraries Unlimited, began in that unpretentious setting, but the result of their effort was a landmark in state government bibliography. For the first time, in the 1970s librarians had a guide to valuable reference material at the state level which has long been known as a complicated, yet rewarding, area in which to work.

Since the passage of P.L. 94–142, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, on November 29, 1975, mandating that handicapped students be educated in the least restrictive environments possible, there has been an increasing demand for information related to the education of the handicapped. A common observation of teachers and administrators is that tedious hours of paperwork and conferences are required to plan individualized programs and meet governmental mandates.

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Tenn. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.

There are very few state document selection tools. Most states publish some type of state document checklist, but the quality of checklists varies widely. Some are little more than agency and title listings of documents; others are extremely useful and complete bibliographic and selection tools. Beyond the state checklists, selection sources are few in number and lacking in both depth and currency. This article reviews the sources that are available, and suggests strategies for the selection of state documents.

This index accompanies the index that appeared in Reference Services Review 16:4 (1988). As noted in the introduction to that index, the articles in RSR that deal with specific reference titles can be grouped into two categories: those that review specific titles (to a maximum of three) and those that review titles pertinent to a specific subject or discipline. The index in RSR 16:4 covered the first category; it indexed, by title, all titles that had been reviewed in the “Reference Serials” and the “Landmarks of Reference” columns, as well as selected titles from the “Indexes and Indexers,” “Government Publications,” and “Special Feature” columns of the journal.

The following is an annotated bibliography of materials published in 1978 on orienting users to the library and on instructing them in the use of reference and other resources. A few entries have a 1977 publication date and are included because information about them was not available in time for the 1977 review. Also some entries are not annotated because the compiler was unable to secure a copy of the information.

The federal government is frequently described as being the greatest information producer (in volume, if nothing else) in the world. Yet, the fact is often ignored that the federal government, as an entity, is one of the world's greatest information consumers. Its concerns are great and far‐reaching; many societal problems are on the cutting edge of research, and all possible forces are brought to bear in addressing them. It is not surprising that the federal government frequently finds a large body of literature which must be synthesized and be made available for immediate use in a convenient form. To meet these needs, the U.S. government has developed indices to the scholarly and research literature in fields with which it is intimately involved: labor, wildlife, environment, energy, and so forth. Perhaps the best known products of these efforts are the Bibliography of Agriculture and Index Medicus.

State publications are sometimes regarded as under utilized resources, the neglected orphans of the library. Yet they contain essential, pertinent information. Publications from various states are often the only source of information for the following types of questions: biographical data on state officials; agency addresses; statistics covering crimes, revenue, state aid and election returns; and information about social issues, such as health, race, the aged, and women's issues.

In 1840 the ancient city of Brechin was the kind of community which was ceasing to be important. It was a market town of some 6000 people set in the fertile countryside of Angus in North East Scotland. During the Age of Improvement market towns had become wealthy by selling hitherto novel and expensive goods and services to the surrounding countrypeople who purchased them with the profits of capitalistic agriculture. Now the initiative was slipping away to cities like nearby Dundee and the emergent industrial centres of the central belt of Scotland. Nevertheless the town had a flax mill, a bleachfield, several linen works and two distilleries. There was also work for nine ministers, nine lawyers and nine doctors. The ministers and lawyers were particularly important: the former propounded rival arguments about church government, the latter formalised and interpreted the resulting conflicts. Their part in this cameo of library history calls for some explanation.

The article describes a project undertaken at the National Library of Wales to compare automated systems for the storage and retrieval of historic cartographic records. The selection and purchase of software, cataloguing of a representative sample of historic cartographic materials, system customisation and data input is outlined. Following the evaluation of systems, conclusions are drawn for future automated map catalogue development.