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FINNISH ARCHITECTURE has won fame and honour. This applies to the best of it, of course, the achievements suitable for export and as a trade mark. Our world image tells nothing of our middling, ordinary buildings. Finland probably has just as many deficiently planned and poorly implemented monstrosities as most other countries. But it is probably characteristic that the end product is technically quite polished. The building regulations are exceptionally precise, partly because of our harsh climate, partly because of the bureaucratic tradition of our administrative machinery.

The article analyzes the development of the Finnish research in library and information science into its present position of high qualitative and quantitative level (in relation to the size of the research community). A number of aspects that may explain the success of the Finnish research are presented: 1) the early academic context, i.e., the establishment of the chair in LIS at the University of Tampere in 1971, 2) the new conception of LIS that emerged in Finland in the early 1980s shifting the attention from institutions into users and actions, 3) internationalization of research including publishing in peer reviewed journals, participating in international conferences, inviting foreign top-researchers into Finland, and organizing international conferences that have become institutionalized (CoLIS and ISIC), and 4) the selection of priority areas for the research effort combined with the concentration of research and doctoral education in research groups.

R.M. Fishenden Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Harwell, described the general organization of the conference, which was divided into seven areas, half a day being devoted to each area and all delegates able to attend. For each area the organizers had selected a discussion panel which took up about two‐thirds of the time available for discussion; other participants, such as authors and members of other panels, could speak during the remaining time. The rest of the conference delegates were segregated behind a rope barrier, solely as observers.

Miss Elizabeth Petree has been appointed Administrative Assistant to the Director of Aslib, and joined the staff in November. Miss Petree was Deputy Secretary of the College of General Practitioners from 1954 to 1964. She was earlier employed at the Royal Institute of International Affairs.

Describes the task of the National Library of Economics and the Serial Database, a union list of serials in Germany providing an online document ordering module. Types of user, subject requests and date and country of publications are presented and discussed. Concludes that the overall performance of the service is favourable.

This survey is not comprehensive. It is highly selective and intended to keep the reader informed of significant new ideas and developments. All unsigned abstracts are prepared by members of Aslib's staff. We should be grateful to any reader who would notify us of worth‐while articles in the field of documentation from unlikely sources.

A seminar on interlibrary lending in Western Europe was held in September 1983, to review the present situation and consider future development. Papers were presented on the position in 16 countries. Good statistics are generally lacking on both demand and performance, document supply has been increasingly recognized as important, and several countries have made efforts to plan for more effective national provision and supply, mostly involving subject specialization. Schemes are limited by the need to keep within a restricted budget and a lack of additional government funding. Automated union catalogues have been developed or planned in most countries. On the costs of interlending there is increasing debate but little consensus; charges are rarely made. The impact of new technology on requesting and supplying documents will be gradual but may be profound, particularly in that it will increase the involvement of the private sector. International lending continues to develop, especially in the Nordic area. The seminar agreed on various action points to keep representatives of all the countries informed of developments and to promote better and easier use of one another's resources.

The aim of this project was to devise and put into practice a system that would permit publication of an index (the Index Medicus) of greater coverage, currency, and ease of use than the previous Current List of Medical Literature, published by the National Library of Medicine. The latter was the largest indexing service of a specialized subject anywhere in the world, 1,600 journals being indexed regularly every month. Further expansion of the Current List was impossible without considerably speeding up the collating and numbering of the entries for each issue and the hand‐mounting of all entry slips on page‐boards to be sent to the printers. These operations could not begin until all the material for a month's issue had been collected and a twenty‐four‐hour timetable for these processes had already been introduced to reduce the delay to the minimum. Mechanization was clearly necessary.

The ultimate estimate of the value of any piece of information is measured by the change it creates. This paper considers the problem of utilizing information under three headings:

Since Bernal made his pilot survey of the use of scientific literature for the 1948 Royal Society Scientific Information Conference, at least three dozen other investigations have been reported of the needs of scientists and engineers for information, of their information gathering habits, and the use to which they put information.