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Commonly, staff support is conceived of in terms of counselling. Centres on counselling as a form of staff support, and questions the idea that it can be realistically offered within work settings. The idea that a short course plus some unsupervised practice might adequately prepare a person to counsel others is rejected. A second issue discussed is: who should undertake psychological staff support within work settings – managers, personnel staff, occupational health‐care staff or external counsellors? Counselling and guidance are distinguished as different forms of staff support which may be combined. Three major areas of guidance are identified – vocational, health and welfare, financial and legal.

WHERE are we going? The aim is to double our standard of living in the next 25 years and, as Sir Alexander Fleck, K.B.E., Chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries Ltd., so aptly staled recently, ‘The man who knows where he is going is the one who is most likely to arrive.’ One might venture to expand this statement by adding that he is still more likely to arrive if the cluttering debris of inefficient methods and movements are cleared away.

With profound regret we have to record the death of Colonel Charles Edward Cassal, F.I.C., who passed away on Dec. 22nd at his residence in London. The sad news has only reached us at the moment—when we are going to press. We hope to publish in the January issue an appreciation of his life, his remarkable abilities, his high minded and lofty nature, and the beneficent work which he achieved in the interests of the profession which he so conspicuously adorned. Colonel Cassal was the founder of “The British Food Journal,” and, in addition to his multifarious official duties, he occupied for fifteen years the position of Editor of the Journal.

Commonly known as ecstasy, MDMA has been central to the British acid house, rave and dance club scene over the last 20 years. Figures from the annual national British Crime Survey suggest that ecstasy use has declined since 2001. This apparent decline is considered here alongside the concurrent emergence of a ‘new’ form of ecstasy ‐ MDMA powder or crystal ‐ and the extent to which this can be seen as a successful rebranding of MDMA as a ‘premium’ product in the wake of user disenchantment with cheap and easily available but poor quality pills. These changes have occurred within a policy context, which in the last decade has increasingly prioritised the drugs‐crime relationship through coercive treatment of problem drug users within criminal justice‐based interventions, alongside a focus on binge drinking and alcohol‐related harm. This has resulted in a significant reduction in the information, support and treatment available to ecstasy users since the height of dance drug harm reduction service provision pioneered by the Safer Dancing model in the mid‐1990s.

Socioeconomic aims and impacts are an explicit part of the UK City of Culture (UKCoC) application, bidding, delivery and evaluation stages. This article engages with existing debates on evaluating cities of culture and introduces perspectives from critical data studies to examine the collection and analysis of different data for the purposes of the CoC application and evaluation processes.

The meta-methodological concept of accompanying researcher is used to analyse the experiences of researchers based within a city bidding for UKCoC 2025 in dialogue with the evaluation reports from past UKCoC host cities.

Findings are analysed under three themes: defining data morsels; local histories and infrastructures of data generation and sharing; and resources, capacities and expertise for data generation and evaluation. The discussion examines data still to be generated and/or brought into relation; tensions around data and measurement; and how constructing an evaluation baseline is generative—creating new organisations, relationships and practices.

The conceptual and methodological approach and empirical findings will be relevant for academic, policymakers and practitioners engaging with cultural evaluation.

In focussing on the bidding stage in real time through the accompanying researcher position, this article presents original empirical insights into the process of creating a baseline for cities of culture evaluation. The conceptual originality of this article is in using critical data studies to explain strategies of data generation and analyse data relations and frictions.

Just a hundred years ago great developments were pending in this country in matters relating to health and to the diagnosis and treatment of disease. It was in 1852 that Pasteur began his epoch‐making researches on the subject of bacterial fermentation. At about the same time the ophthalmoscope was introduced. In 1854 Florence Nightingale was busy demanding reforms in nursing, and in 1855 the hypodermic syringe was invented. In 1858 a register of qualified dentists was established for the first time. But the years 1851 to 1854 were remarkable also for the institution and prosecution for the first time in British history of an active campaign for the suppression of the adulteration of food. There was little knowledge of this subject and almost no laws, with two minor exceptions. It was nominally an offence under a statute of George IV to adulterate bread with alum—but no public official had any duty to enforce it. Also, there were certain Revenue Acts, enforceable by the Customs and Excise Department, which in the interests of the Revenue, not of consumers, forbade the adulteration of certain excisable articles of food. But the machinery of the Department was clumsy and inefficient. To two far‐seeing and very courageous men is due the credit for the overdue enactment in 1860 of legislation intended to protect the public from the wholesale adulteration which was rampant a hundred years ago. One was Thomas Wakley, F.R.C.S., Editor of The Lancet. Wakley in 1851 appointed an Analytical and Sanitary Commission, with Dr. A. H. Hassall, M.D., M.R.C.P., as Chief Analyst, to make investigations on a large scale, and promised that the results would be published in his journal, which would announce also the names and addresses of retailers, and of manufacturers when known, of all articles found to be adulterated. A great number of these reports appeared in The Lancet from 1851 to 1854, and were afterwards reprinted in a book by Dr. Hassall. They threw much light on many black spots. The first subject to be tackled was coffee, which was almost invariably adulterated with chicory. Analytical chemists until then had stated that it was impossible for them to detect the adulteration in their laboratories. But Dr. Hassall was a skilled microscopist, as well as a chemist and a doctor. He was the first person in this country to “ apply regularly and systematically the powers of the microscope to the elucidation of the subject of adulteration ”. He was able to detect by his microscope flagrant and widespread adulteration of the following, among many other, foods :—

IT is evident from the numerous press cuttings which are reaching us, that we are once more afflicted with one of those periodical visitations of antagonism to Public Libraries, which occasionally assume epidemic form as the result of a succession of library opening ceremonies, or a rush of Carnegie gifts. Let a new library building be opened, or an old one celebrate its jubilee, or let Lord Avebury regale us with his statistics of crime‐diminution and Public Libraries, and immediately we have the same old, never‐ending flood of articles, papers and speeches to prove that Public Libraries are not what their original promoters intended, and that they simply exist for the purpose of circulating American “Penny Bloods.” We have had this same chorus, with variations, at regular intervals during the past twenty years, and it is amazing to find old‐established newspapers, and gentlemen of wide reading and knowledge, treating the theme as a novelty. One of the latest gladiators to enter the arena against Public Libraries, is Mr. J. Churton Collins, who contributes a forcible and able article, on “Free Libraries, their Functions and Opportunities,” to the Nineteenth Century for June, 1903. Were we not assured by its benevolent tone that Mr. Collins seeks only the betterment of Public Libraries, we should be very much disposed to resent some of the conclusions at which he has arrived, by accepting erroneous and misleading information. As a matter of fact, we heartily endorse most of Mr. Collins' ideas, though on very different grounds, and feel delighted to find in him an able exponent of what we have striven for five years to establish, namely, that Public Libraries will never be improved till they are better financed and better staffed.

THE pages of the Library World have at all times been open to receive the opinions of every side, on all questions of library policy, and we believe that it can be fairly claimed that no other English professional journal can show a greater record of catholicity and freedom from prejudice. Just recently we have published three articles in succession, which plead for, or advocate, some method of mitigating what the writers term the “Fiction Nuisance,” and one result of our complaisance may be witnessed in the stir which has been caused in journalistic quarters, over the alleged shortcomings of Public Libraries, and their scandalous distribution of nothing but fiction! It is argued, with some justice, that, if librarians are so quick to admit the existence of a fiction nuisance, then the case must be very serious indeed; and that it is regarded in this light may be gathered from the article on “Free Libraries,” by Mr. J. Churton Collins, in the June Nineteenth Century. For some reason or another, best known, no doubt, to themselves, certain librarians are always ready to join in the hue and cry against Public Libraries, and to lend the sanction of their authority to the general execration of fiction reading, thus giving a weapon to the enemy which is promptly used to thrash municipal libraries into a pulp. For months past this outcry against libraries has been going on, and there cannot be a single doubt that it has been stimulated by, if it did not originate in, the injudicious apologies for high fiction percentages in some library reports, and the publication of articles by librarians who admit too much, without giving substantial grounds for their conclusions. We are unable to say whether such apologies and articles are dictated by the weak, but human, desire to side with the majority, but there can be no doubt as to their harmful tendency and the evil they are causing all over the country. It is time, therefore, that the other, and, we believe, true side of the question should be put forward, and we propose to devote a series of articles to show that the charges made against Public Libraries of being nothing but huge engines for the distribution of fiction, mostly bad in tone and quality, are either gross misrepresentations, or exaggerations capable of explanation, and justification. As an introduction to this series, we have obtained permission from Mr. Thomas Greenwood, to use the greater part of the paper entitled, “The Great Fiction Question,” which is printed in Greenwoods Library Year Book, 1897, and is now becoming scarce and difficult to procure, owing to the book being out‐of‐print; like the later Year Book of 1900–1901. This paper is a vigorous, fair, and able statement of the case for fiction, which has not received the amount of attention it deserves, and we think it will be performing a service to librarians if we reprint it as a preliminary to our own proposed examination of the question of Fiction Reading in Public Libraries:

THE Fifty‐First Conference of the Library Association takes place in the most modern type of British town. Blackpool is a typical growth of the past fifty years or so, rising from the greater value placed upon the recreations of the people in recent decades. It has the name of the pleasure city of the north, a huge caravansary into which the large industrial cities empty themselves at the holiday seasons. But Blackpool is more than that; it is a town with a vibrating local life of its own; it has its intellectual side even if the casual visitor does not always see it as readily as he does the attractions of the front. A week can be spent profitably there even by the mere intellectualist.

The use of leasing as a means of obtaining business assets has grown spectacularly in recent years in the UK and other countries. This means that many managers have perceived, or been persuaded of, particular benefits which leasing confers. It is necessary, therefore, to understand the issues involved in leasing to appreciate why leasing has become so popular and to be able to evaluate leasing arrangements so that correct decisions can be made.