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As the peaceful uses of atomic energy became an accepted part of modern life, the veils of secrecy were removed from most aspects of nuclear research. Cautiously at first, the developed countries began to exchange nuclear information at scientific meetings and through journals and other media. However, with the widening range of peaceful nuclear applications came a corresponding increase in information, and the complexity of information storage and retrieval was suddenly a concern of paramount importance. National nuclear information centres were set up to satisfy the needs of scientists in their home countries, but a gap still existed in the exchange of information on the international level.

The purpose of this paper is to survey the treatment of relationships, relationship expressions and the ways in which they manifest themselves in image descriptions.

The term “relationship” is construed in the broadest possible way to include spatial relationships (“to the right of”), temporal (“in 1936,” “at noon”), meronymic (“part of”), and attributive (“has color,” “has dimension”). The intentions of these vaguely delimited categories with image information, image creation, and description in libraries and archives is complex and in need of explanation.

The review brings into question many generally held beliefs about the relationship problem such as the belief that the semantics of relationships are somehow embedded in the relationship term itself and that image search and retrieval solutions can be found through refinement of word-matching systems.

This review has no hope of systematically examining all evidence in all disciplines pertaining to this topic. It instead focusses on a general description of a theoretical treatment in Library and Information Science.

THE news that our royal President has been promoted to the command of a frigate sugges an increase rather than a relieving of naval duties. Our pleasure in the announcement is qualified by the fear that the further demands may make his presence with the Library Association in September even more difficult than it seemed to be a month ago. This is pure speculation on our part, but we are aware of the eagerness with which librarians look forward to the central event of the Centenary Year. We are assured that the matter is in good hands and at the right levels.

The 1998 International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) document “Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records” (FRBR) has inspired a family of models that view bibliographic resources in terms of multiple entities differentiated with regard to meaning, expression, and physicality. The purpose of this paper is to compare how three FRBR and FRBR-like models have been expressed as Semantic Web vocabularies based on Resource Description Framework (RDF). The paper focusses on IFLA’s own vocabulary for FRBR; RDF vocabularies for Resource Description and Access (RDA), an emergent FRBR-based standard for library cataloging; and BIBFRAME, an emergent FRBR-like, native-RDF standard for bibliographic data.

Simple test records using the RDF vocabularies were analyzed using software that supports inferencing.

In some cases, what the data actually means appears to differ from what the vocabulary developers presumably intended to mean. Data based on the FRBR vocabulary appears particularly difficult to integrate with data based on different models.

Some of the RDF vocabularies reviewed in the paper could usefully be simplified, enabling libraries to integrate their data more easily into the wider information ecosystem on the Web. Requirements for data consistency and quality control could be met by emergent standards of the World Wide Web Consortium for validating RDF data according to integrity constraints.

There are few such comparisons of the RDF expressions of these models, which are widely assumed to represent the future of library cataloging.

THERE appeared in the Library Association Record some months ago, an article—not very practical—on Accession Methods, and it is with this work that I intend to deal.

Whether readers of this work are students or professionals, they will find the book informative. For the student, Saffady takes care to define all terms and acronyms. Successive sections of each chapter build on the previous ones, so that on completing the book, the student has learned a great deal about optical disks. For the professional, the strength of the book is the organization and review of the optical disk “landscape” it provides.

A unified database to record all printing of the hand press period in Europe (from the beginning of printing until 1830) is being developed by the Consortium of European Research Libraries. The problems encountered in designing this multi‐file, multinational and multilingual database and the solutions adopted, in using the Research Libraries Information Network, are described. Future plans to include relevant holdings from many of Europe’s national library collections are outlined.

Discusses the role of the librarian as manager of an academic library. Compares the nature of library management with that of business management and considers the specific factors of academic library management: personnel, facilities and finance. Discusses survival strategies and academic library management in times of economic recession.