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UNESCO is instructed by its constitution to ‘Maintain, increase and diffuse knowledge … by initiating methods of international co‐operation calculated to give the peoples of all countries access to the printed and published materials produced by any of them’. As one of the methods of carrying out this function the programmes of Unesco both for 1947 and 1948 specifically included plans to ‘facilitate the improvement of scientific documentation and abstracting’, and an Expert Committee on Scientific Abstracting was called together at Unesco House in Paris during the 7th, 8th, and 9th of April 1948, under the joint authority of the Libraries and Natural Science sections, for preliminary work in connexion with an international conference to be held at a later date.

Students in full-time higher education are increasingly combining work with study. This can present challenges and conflicting priorities which may result in stress and compromised academic performance. However, working can also afford students a better quality of life and enhanced employability. The growth of student employment creates implications for universities and employers. In this chapter, we report the results of our research which explored experiences of students at a business school in a large UK university who were working while studying. We examine the experiences and perceived consequences of combining employment with full-time study and seek to understand why students work during their degree program, the challenges and benefits of balancing work and factors which may help and hinder their efforts. The chapter builds on the existing knowledge base about the effects working has on students’ academic performance and well-being, and considers how universities, employers and social circumstances may support students in managing their complex lives.

The suspension of some of the great German medical abstracting services during World War II and the keenly felt need for a comprehensive abstracting service in English, particularly for clinical medicine, brought about the establishment of Excerpta Medica as a non‐profit organization in 1947. Since its inception the service has expanded into several sections covering not only the usual divisions of clinical and preclinical medicine but also subjects like Cancer and Tuberculosis which are of present‐day interest and importance. Now that some of the German abstracting services have been revived there is apt to be some amount of duplication between them and Excerpta Medica, and the small library in particular has to evaluate them to get the best for the money or the most suitable for its purposes.

THE recent dearth of newspapers was in some ways revealing. They were missed by many it is true, but, with the greater newscasts by the B.B.C., the essential news was well presented to most of us. Intellectually we were probably not the worse, in fact, we may be better for less absorption in the daily and evening columns. But, what was missed was the something to read which has become essential in modern life. Statistics are not yet available of the effects on circulation figures from libraries but in at least one instance a considerable increase is attributed to the strike. It is probable that Everyman does not connect events and things well, and in the reading famine has not associated his need with his local library. The extent however, to which he and his wife have done so is a matter that may well be brought out in the library reports for 1955–6.

This series of annual reviews of the literature of special librarianship, which now reaches its fifth year, has been designed to help those most in need of the body of professional experience contained in the literature. Those special librarians or information officers with little or no professional training, who work in small departments far away from more experienced colleagues, have only the recorded knowledge in the literature to help them, but, because of lack of experience, they are often unable to sift from the mass of articles of varying value and character which crowd the pages of the professional journals the comparatively few items likely to be of practical use to them. For their benefit we present a selection of those papers really likely to give them solid help, leaving aside all purely theoretical and polemical articles, however important, and all literature on large libraries, unless they are likely to have applications in smaller ones. To these we add a selection of reference books likely to be of professional use to anyone in information work, including a number which he may wish to know about, even though he does not have them in his own library. The list is not restricted to work published in 1956, but is intended rather to be representative of items received in British libraries during that year. With the growing volume of library literature, the choice of a hundred or so items is bound to be in some respects a personal one, with which many may disagree, especially over the omissions, but it is hoped that all the items included will be of positive value.

All items listed may be borrowed from the Aslib Library, except those marked, which may be consulted in the Library.