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In the context of a somewhat turbulent graduate labour market, attention is being focused on the employment of graduates in small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs). This paper takes an initial “sounding” of our understanding about the transition of graduates into such organisations. While research data provides some insight into the barriers which work to discourage more SMEs from recruiting graduates, this understanding appears inadequate and insufficiently segmented to provide a detailed knowledge of the problems. A prevailing assumption is that graduates lack skills required by SME employers. Yet the limited research findings reveal ambiguity about the extent to which SMEs effectively deploy graduate labour. The article proposes an agenda that highlights the need for two types of research. First, a clearer picture of current trends in the SME graduate labour market. Second, a richer understanding of the real experience of graduates, and their managers, in relation to employment in an SME and the implications of such for both the supply and demand sides of the graduate labour market.

My colleagues have dealt most admirably with two detailed aspects of starting a new library from scratch; with a certain amount of low cunning, I have reserved for myself the task of speaking more generally about the end product of their efforts—for books, no matter how lavishly they are provided, and buildings, no matter how well planned and executed, are only the essential preparation or raw material for the librarian's proper task of getting information (whether in books or serials or pamphlets or videotape) to the people who need it.

THE TERM operational research was coined, it is said, in 1937. From 1957 it became familiar to British librarians in the planning stages of the National Lending Library, Boston Spa. About ten years ago the work of Graham Mackenzie's Lancaster University research group became widely known. Yet, unlike costing or “O and M”, operational research has not become part of the do‐it‐yourself kit of the young administrator in Britain.

During the planning period of Lancaster University Library, much thought was given to the available methods of producing unit cards for the catalogue. The prime considerations were speed of production, since it was estimated that an output of twenty thousand sets of entries would be required each year, and economy in operation; in our situation, with all capital costs being met by a direct non‐recurrent grant from the UGC, the initial outlay was not such a critical factor in the choice, but obviously had to be taken into consideration. The appearance and quality of the finished entries were also important.

It is with great regret that the Editorial Board has learned that Miss Barbara Kyle has been compelled by a serious illness to resign her appointments as Research Librarian of Aslib and Managing Editor of the Journal of Documentation, which she has held with distinction since 1962. Readers of the Journal and its contributors (among whom she has often been numbered) cannot have failed to note the smooth efficiency with which Miss Kyle has carried out the complicated task of ensuring that its successive parts have appeared punctually and in good order: the Editorial Board will continue to benefit from her wide experience, since she remains one of its members.

In presenting some account of the work being done at Lancaster on the systems analysis of a university library, I wish to make it quite clear at the beginning what I do not mean. We are not concerned with “scientific management” as defined in the recent book by Dougherty and Heinritz — time and motion study, work measurement or work simplification, the re‐design of forms and stationery, and all the other paraphernalia of low‐level industrial or commercial management. These admittedly have their place, but only a minor one: it profits a library little if its procedures are all perfect, but all directed to the wrong ends.

Given the current situation of the world's developed nations, it is hardly surprising that the economical organization of libraries is an area of study which has aroused considerable interest over the past few years; a large amount of work has been done in both America and Britain, and a number of bibliographies and literature reviews have appeared (e.g. 1–4). No attempt will be made here to be similarly exhaustive, since the object of the Progress in Documentation series is to highlight only the most significant contributions to the current state‐of‐the‐art; a further self‐imposed limitation is that every item quoted should be, in the reviewer's opinion, either actually or potentially useful to the librarian‐at‐the‐shelf, who has to turn his mind to the practicalities of operating a real system. It is all very well to treat library management as an academic exercise, a way‐station in the career development of a management scientist, as we see in all too many published examples—one, which shall remain anonymous, produces some elegant models and manipulations, but openly admits that the data required to make them operable do not exist, and moreover could never be collected; but if the librarian cannot follow what the researcher is saying, or see any benefit from applying his results or methods, then from the practical point of view the research might as well not have been carried out or published. It is unfortunately true that there is a great gulf fixed between the two sides: the librarian neither understands, nor wishes to bother with, the detailed mathematical treatment of models, while the theorist is not interested in any problem which is conceptually simple, even though in practical terms it may be difficult to solve. What is needed in this area is common sense, the ability to think at large, untrammelled by received professional wisdom, and to relate the converging products of many separate disciplines to the problem in hand; this is why the research teams which have achieved the most significant results are those which contain a mixture of librarians and management scientists.

All publicly‐funded libraries have been hard hit by the government's financial policies since the early 1980s; it may be that a measure of austerity is beneficial, in that it encourages creative thought and more effective management. However in the universities, at least, the damage done to services has been significant, white collections have suffered even more. Since inflation in book and periodical prices is not fully reflected in the grants given to libraries, an effective annual reduction of 5—10 per cent is to be expected: unless this trend can be halted university libraries will no longer be able to support worthwhile research, either in the humanities or the sciences.

“Corporate planning” is the term which, perhaps more than any other, epitomises the adoption of business management techniques by the public sector. In Britain, with massive local government reorganisation in 1974, many librarians were forced to come to terms with such techniques whether they liked it or not. Of course, in its purest sense corporate planning applies to the combined operation of an entire organisation be it local authority, university, government department or industrial firm. However, in this paper I do not intend discussing “the grand design” whereby the library is merely a component part of a greater body. Rather, it is my intention to view the library as the corporate body. It is a perfectly possible and very useful exercise to apply the principles of corporate planning, and the management techniques involved, to the running of a library or group of libraries. Indeed, many librarians have already done this either independently or as their part in the corporate plan of their parent organisation.

This chapter advances an articulation of the contemporary knowledge worker as an infrastructural bricoleur. The practical and pragmatic intelligence of the contemporary knowledge worker, particularly those involved in project-based work, reflects an ability to build adaptable practices and routines, and to develop a set of working arrangements that is creative and event-laden. Like Ciborra’s octopi, workers augment infrastructures by drawing on certain forms of oblique, twisted, flexible, circular, polymorphic and ambiguous thinking until an accommodation can be found. These workers understand the non-linearity of work and working, and are artful in their pursuits around, through and beyond infrastructural givens. Modern knowledge work, then, when looked at through the lens of infrastructure and bricolage, is less a story of failure to understand, a limitation in training or the shortcomings of a system, but instead is more a mirror of the contemporary realities of today’s knowledge work drift as reflected in individuals’ sociotechnical practices.