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The Annual General Meeting was held on 29th March at the College of Advanced Technology, Birmingham. Officers for 1961–2 were elected as follows: Chairman, Mr B. M. Bland, University of Birmingham; Vice‐Chairman, Mr D. R. C. Whale, Tube Investments Ltd; Hon. Secretary, Mr E. H. C. Driver, College of Advanced Technology, Birmingham; Hon. Treasurer, Mr B.H. Vickery, GKN Group Research Laboratories, Wolverhampton. Mr Bennitt retired from the Committee after five years' service.

The majority of industrial libraries are small, and this is particularly true of those in the construction industry. There is therefore a lack of information about actual library practice in this area. This survey was carried out as part of a Ph.D. research project at the University of Aston in Birmingham, the major part of which was concerned with the computerization of the library of Taylor Woodrow Construction Ltd. The survey was done to see how far this library was typical, and whether computerization would be beneficial elsewhere. In this summary of the survey I have concentrated on the general aspects of construction industry libraries, and only briefly discuss computerization.

This gives an account of work done since that reported in Program and up to the end of the feasibility study stage of the project. Activities are noted under the names of working groups responsible for initiating and implementing them.

A library, like any other man‐made system, exists to provide services that are believed to meet certain needs. It will be effective to the extent that user needs have been correctly gauged, and that the services provided do in fact meet them.

1) REPORT OF INFORMATION OFFICER'S VISIT TO NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY SEPTEMBER 27th, 1971 1. Unfortunately my visit to the libirary was very short. I talked to Mr. Alan Jeffreys (Sub‐Librarian, Cataloguing) about the catalogue Computerisation Project (CCP) and I also met Mr. John Bagnall (Automation Officer) end Mr. Colin Balmforth (Deputy Librarian); there was no time to look at the automated Acquisitions system.

Most of the major research projects to be carried out by Aslib in accordance with its programme will necessarily take the best part of a year to complete, and some of them longer. In the interval between the start of work on a project and the final publication of results, members, particularly when they have themselves co‐operated directly in an investigation by providing data, may well wish to know what progress is being made. For this reason brief notes about current research work will be published in Aslib Proceedings at intervals. They may include reports on minor ad hoc investigations the results of which are not to be fully reported elsewhere.

At the February evening meeting Dr T. C. Barker of the Department of Economic History, London School of Economics, will be talking on ‘Business records for the future’. Mr Geoffrey Woledge, Librarian of the British Library of Political and Economic Science, will take the chair. Dr Barker will discuss the impossibility of preserving all business records, and the need to foresee what type of document is likely to be called for in the future, either by members of the particular business concerned or by historians who are called in to write the history of a firm. Broadly speaking, it is the policy documents that need to be kept and the day‐to‐day records that can often be disposed of; but there are exceptions to this general rule.

The Birmingham Libraries Cooperative Mechanisation Project (BLCMP) was formed by the libraries of the universities of Aston and Birmingham, and Birmingham Public Libraries, to investigate the feasibility of cooperation in the use of MARC records. A general introduction to the aims and history of the Project are contained in previous reports in Program, Vol.3,nos.2 and 3/4, 1969, and Vol.4, no.4, 1970.

This paper represents a brief survey of automation in relation to its existing or probable applications in the spheres of libraries and information work.

Since January 1971, the British National Bibliography has been producing MARC tapes as a by‐product of the process of computer type‐setting the printed BNB Weekly List. (In this paper, the tapes are referred to as ‘BNB MARC’.) Experimental tapes have been available since 1968. In July and August 1971, Aslib Research and Development Department carried out a survey of BNB MARC users, limited to those libraries in the British Isles using the tapes for a regular service or experimenting with them as a part of the original MARC network (listed in Appendix II). The report is limited to the use in mid‐1971 of MARC tapes provided by BNB, but Appendix III includes brief notes on some work begun after August 1971. No system is described in depth; those interested in greater detail are referred to the selected references at the end. Most of the systems, especially operational ones, are reported there, making description here unnecessary.