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March 6, 1969 Contract — Formation — Intention to create legal relationship — Collective agreement — Joint negotiating committee of employer and trade unions — Agreements regulating procedure and conditions of employment of employee members — No express provision for agreement to be actionable at law — Background of opinion that agreement not legally enforceable — Wording of clauses raising difficulties of enforcement — Whether intended to be enforceable — Whether legally binding.

This review is based for the most part on conference proceedings. It begins with a look at recent developments in interlending in Australasia, with a comparison of interlending statistics, and papers from a resource‐sharing conference in New Zealand reporting Australian and New Zealand interlending practice. Unresolved attempts to define an interlending plan for Australia are discussed together with the present situation. Two delegates' papers at a conference in Western Australia report contrasting developments there. Turning to the UK, four papers from an interlending conference consider the current UK situation, financial aspects, the end user's view and future development of interlending. Finally, a world‐wide collection of ‘proceedings’ is reviewed, dealing with different interlending systems in the UK, FRG, GDR, USA, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, China and the European Communities' DOCDEL project, with particular reference to Patent information in Germany and the TRANSDOC project in France.

The relationship between information provider and client is a crucial measure of effectiveness. In commerce the success of this relationship might be measured by market share or profitability, while in the non‐profit sector, where most libraries and information services (but not all) exist, the success might be measured by criteria such as document delivery and satisfaction. We speak of effectiveness, implying the extent to which the service can successfully impact upon and meet the needs of the users. Particularly if the model which management supports is a community‐based model (as opposed, say, to a stock‐holding model), then the relationship and interaction between service and user group lies at the heart of the matter.

The education and employment sectors could get together to create a unified careers advisory service. Geoffrey Ford explains why and how this should be done.

A library requiring items on interlibrary loan has several alternative sources of supply, at any rate for some categories of material. For example, with serials, locations can be looked up in BUCOP and application made direct; or there may be a local or subject union list that can be used in the same way; or requests can be sent to the British Library Lending Division (BLLD). For English‐language monographs, especially British, there is a choice between the regional system and the BLLD. For most other categories of material, including foreign language monographs, there is little alternative to the BLLD, though there may be other small systems available in certain subjects and regions.

Any one specialist trade is dependent upon the success or failure of another in the food industry.

Most traditional industries pass through a phase when massive re‐organisation is necessary for survival, and during that period have difficulty attracting either sufficient staff or staff of the right quality. In certain respects public prejudice may be justified. But that prejudice may also be based on generalisations which fail to examine present performance and future potential, or to distinguish between growth areas and areas where contraction (but not necessarily decline) may be inevitable.

The task of the librarian is to achieve his library's objectives. A simplistic statement, perhaps, but it is rare that a library's objectives are defined in any terms other than the broadest—for example, ‘to meet the needs of its users’. In fact, the definition of objectives in any service organization is likely to be an iterative process, but the explicit commitment to users‘ needs (however mystical this concept may be) requires the librarian to examine users’ behaviour as a first step to determining policy. Since a complete state‐of‐the‐art in user behaviour would fill a substantial book, this survey is restricted to drawing together some threads of research of potential application in university libraries. Methodological problems are not discussed here, since these are adequately reviewed elsewhere.

Formation of the Federation of Materials Institutes The Institute of Ceramics, The Institute of Metals and The Plastics and Rubber Institute announce the formation on 1 June 1988 of the Federation of Materials Institutes.