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In Britain, university libraries encountered a decline in funding later than in the US, but had never enjoyed support sufficient to permit ambitious acquisitions schemes designed to extend the national information resource which together academic library collections constitute. Hitherto new technology, so far from reducing the output of literature in conventional formats, has merely enlarged the number of the claimants for limited funds: snared cataloguing networks, while offering economies, threaten to erode the position of the scholar‐cataloguer, so posing a threat to parity with academic staff. Never, Ratcliffe argues, has the need been greater for the combined expertise of library staff and faculty in collection‐building for the future.

In his remarkable essay “On books and the housing of them” Gladstone was apprehensive of developments which have since become major problems of library administration. He observed that “already the increase of books is passing into geometrical progression” and he predicted that it was “in truth difficult to assign dimensions for the libraries of the future”. He proposed in somewhat pointed terms a Victorian version of Boston Spa. From the evergrowing mass of books, items would have to be selected for “interment”, “burial”. “Undoubtedly the idea of book‐cemeteries such as I have supposed is formidable. It should be kept within the limits of the dire necessity … But it will have to be faced, and faced perhaps oftener than might be supposed. And the artist needed for the constructions it requires will not be so much a librarian as a warehouseman ”. He speaks of “boundless' demand for books, of their processing and of their housing. Of special interest in this essay are his comments on preservation. “If we wish to give to the block [of the text] a lease of life equal to that of the pages, the first condition is that it should be bound. So at least one would have said half a century ago. But, while books are in most instances cheaper, binding, from causes which I do not understand, is dearer, at least in England, than it was in my early years. So that few can afford it. We have, however, the tolerable and very useful expedient of cloth binding (now in some danger, I fear, of losing its modesty through flaring ornamentation) to console us”.

It is difficult to recall ten years later the depth of feeling roused among university librarians in Britain by the report of a University Grants Committee Working Party on Capital provision for university libraries. “Anger, indignation, incredulity and despondency” were among the immediate reactions to the Atkinson report, nor were these reactions confined to university librarians alone. The academic community at large reacted violently to the proposals, and in so doing identified the well‐being of universities unequivocally with that of their libraries.

Preservation awareness is needed by all staff, and should be in professional education curricula and in subprofessional training courses. Technical training is largely in the hands of the binding industry, but as a profession we need to take a greater interest.

A year ago, in December 1987, CURL (The Consortium of University Research Libraries) received funding from the UGC to establish a pilot project for resource sharing, using the facilities of the JANET network. The money was provided to facilitate the exchange of information about library acquisitions and holdings and to make efficient arrangements for the exchange of catalogue data. This article does not discuss the broad objectives of this CURL project nor its role in the currently changing patterns of record supply and resource sharing in the UK. A more general article by the founders of CURL, D. J. Foskett and F. W. Ratcliffe, is to be published shortly. VINE has set out to look principally at the technical aspects of the project, especially the work involved in mounting large files and the software used. This is CATS, the online catalogue software, written in FORTRAN 77, which was developed at Cambridge University Library [see VINE, 63, 21–25].

The technological and other changes affecting research libraries in recent decades are reviewed in relation to the book and its conservation, and to once traditional book‐centred librarians. The status of the scholar librarian and book conservation are considered in the light of those changes and with regard to present day requirements for the management of library services.

This article reviews recent preservation activity in Britain, considers the place of preservation in library management and looks to its future development. The many and broad aspects of preservation which impinge on library management are indicated. Much progress has been made in recent years, but there remain those who need persuading to reassess their attitude towards it. If the current preservation impetus is to be maintained and extended, then the question of funding, in particular, must be successfully addressed. Co‐operative programmes and integration of preservation into overall library management and policy will be significant in achieving this.

The recent article on the economics of catalogue card reproduction by A. G. Mackenzie contains a number of observations in the use of offset litho which are completely at variance with experience in the University Library of Newcastle upon Tyne. The decision was taken early in 1964 to introduce unit cards and to seek a speedy method of reproducing them. As the University was new only in the matter of its charter there was no direct non‐recurrent grant from UGC to meet costs. The Friden Flexo‐writer was out of the question and after examining the available systems, the choice finally settled on the Multilith Model 80.

As Nicholas Barker has pointed out, concern with the problem of deteriorating books has a long history. In 1898 the Prefect of the Vatican Library convened an international conference in St Gall to consider the decay of paper, in particular the new cheaper papers produced from wood pulp. Thereafter a number of libraries established conservation laboratories and the Bodleian monitored tests of the efficacy of different methods of treating paper. An even earlier concern for conservation is noted by Alex Wilson. In the Abbey of Admont the librarian's task was laid down in 1370 as