Search results

The parallels between child abuse and adult abuse have been frequently noted as public awareness of both has increased in recent decades. Both can involve the concealed victimisation of a weaker family member, for both interventions are difficult to implement because practitioners are loath to intrude into the privacy of the family and risk causing harm, and combating abuse of either type demands multi‐agency working. Significant differences between the two abuse constituencies have also been stressed, namely that adults are not invariably dependents reliant for care on the persons mistreating them and have the autonomy to resist efforts to intervene on their behalf.

This article reports the results of a survey of local authorities, which asked about progress in responding to the Department of Health guidance, No Secrets. The findings of the survey suggest that the majority of local authorities are taking action in response to the guidance. However, there is variation in progress with the different components of the framework for the protection of vulnerable adults outlined in No Secrets.

A WRITER in another page suggests the necessity of agreement amongst librarians, especially on matters which concern the men and women overseas. This in a clear case is of moment in the question of education and the resettling of these young people, whose lives have been so grievously interfered with by their service. We have already indicated that there are opportunities for setting up centres of training that are better than we have had before. If, however, everything that has been planned can be the sport of a few hundred members at a conference, no progress is possible. Nor can we reach Utopia at a bound; there is sure to be something in the new plans of the Reconstruction Report, the new teaching scheme, the new syllabus, that somebody disapproves; that is inevitable. Let students be reassured, there will, and can be, no attempt to discount any certificates or qualification they already possess nor, under a year at least, can any new syllabus be used for examinations.

THE catalogue, as a library appliance of importance, has had more attention devoted to it than, perhaps, any other method or factor of librarianship. Its construction, materials, rules for compilation and other aspects have all been considered at great length, and in every conceivable manner, so that little remains for exposition save some points in the policy of the catalogue, and its effects on progress and methods. In the early days of the municipal library movement, when methods were somewhat crude, and hedged round with restrictions of many kinds, the catalogue, even in the primitive form it then assumed, was the only key to the book‐wealth of a library, and as such its value was duly recognized. As time went on, and the vogue of the printed catalogue was consolidated, its importance as an appliance became more and more established, and when the first Newcastle catalogue appeared and received such an unusual amount of journalistic notice, the idea of the printed catalogue as the indispensable library tool was enormously enhanced from that time till quite recently. One undoubted result of this devotion to the catalogue has been to stereotype methods to a great extent, leading in the end to stagnation, and there are places even now where every department of the library is made to revolve round the catalogue. Whether it is altogether wise to subordinate everything in library work to the cult of the catalogue has been questioned by several librarians during the past few years, and it is because there is so much to be said against this policy that the following reflections are submitted.

WE have now to regard Indexing from quite another standpoint. Hitherto we have been assuming it to be undertaken from a co‐operative point of view, as in the case of Poole's Index and also in that of the Review of Reviews. In special work, the greater the magnitude of the task, as in the instance of Science as a whole, and any large divisions of Science, the more likely is co‐operative effort to be required, but speaking generally special indexes are largely the result of individual effort. It is here that that discrepancy in execution, allusion to which has been made earlier, becomes so manifest. It is my principal object to show how these contradictory methods, the natural result of several minds working on no fixed or settled plan, may be avoided. No space, therefore, will be wasted on detailing these inconsistencies, for the reader's and student's interests will be better served by the more positive method of pointing out how to index on a fixed and settled system. As in the previous section practical illustrations will appear later on to demonstrate this.