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SCHEMES FOR the national library services of developing countries make the British library world seem positively victorian by comparison. Two factors, however, are likely to be agents of change in the next few years. At the apex of the pyramid, the proposals for the British Library will rationalise the British Museum, the National Central Library, the National Lending Library for Science and Technology and the British National Bibliography complex. At more local levels, the re‐organisation of local government in England will ensure more effective provision of public library services under unitary control.

MY RECENT articles on ‘Our professional frustrations’ (NLW, January) and ‘Opportunities for librarians in public relations’ (NLW, March), were intended to show that mid‐senior librarians, and particularly the ‘old ALAS’, do not have to remain in jobs where prospects and satisfaction have declined, due partly to local government reorganisation drastically reducing promotional opportunities. Two reactions immediately following publication of the March article: one from a senior librarian, very comfortably placed financially, who described my views as ‘a policy of despair’; the other from a younger librarian closer to the type for whom the article was written, who was clearly interested in my views. As they say, it all depends …

AFTER 17 years continuous service as a LA Council member it seemed strange to me to attend the first council meeting of 1979 as NLW'S reporter.

This is No. 21 of Supplements to Computers in Libraries and reprints papers on online library catalogues presented to the March 1989 Computers in Libraries Conference held in Oakland, California. There are apparently three US procurement documents, Request for Proposals (RFP), Request for Information (RFI) and Request for Quotation (RFQ) which have to be completed when buying new, large‐scale equipment from suppliers and these documents dominate the process of choice and purchase. Several of the papers in this collection deal with completing these forms when acquiring or changing systems, and would have little interest in the UK. The other papers offer more general advice on coping with the problems which arise when manual processes are replaced by high‐tech systems. Such problems are exaggerated in cases where patrons expect more of the system than it can actually deliver. However, what is being described is essentially American practice and library users in the US have a subtly different attitude from that found on this side of the Atlantic. The value of the text to UK librarians would therefore be limited to the opportunity for making comparisons with their own systems.

SERIALS pose a problem for cataloguers which is essentially simple in its solution. Title entry is the obvious and most satisfactory method of entering a serial in a catalogue and has been recognised as such by modern cataloguing codes. However, a large number of serials are issued or published by corporate bodies and because cataloguing codes have failed to find a suitable solution to the difficulties of entry under corporate body they have created considerable confusion with the construction of consistent access points. The problem has still not been resolved and in the summer 1980 issue of Library resources and technical services C. Sumner Spalding observed that “the most significant category of publications for which the application of the corporate author principle has had its most severe challenge is serials”.