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Women and marketing have had a complicated relationship for a considerable time. They have often been involved with marketing‐type practices for longer than we have appreciated to date. Against considerable odds, some have carved out careers in academia and practice that have to be admired. The purpose of this paper is to explore the work of two pioneer contributors to marketing.

This paper engages in a close reading of the work of two female contributors. Their writing is placed in historical context which helps reveal the obstacles they had to overcome to succeed.

Female teachers, lecturers and practitioners had an important role to play in theorising consumer practice and helping people to successfully negotiate a complex marketplace replete with new challenges, difficulties and sometimes mendacious marketers seeking to profit from the limited knowledge consumers possessed.

This paper explores the writings of a practitioner and scholar respectively whose work has merited only limited attention previously. More than this, it links the arguments that are made to the papers that appear in the rest of the special issue.

David Wood’s library career was spent entirely in the British Library. Over a period of several decades he made a significant contribution to the ongoing debate on serials and scholarly communication through research, conference presentations and publications. His main areas of interest included the role of national libraries in the serials information chain, use of serials literature, document delivery and grey literature. This article documents his contribution and examines further developments in these areas.

This article describes the role of the E‐Books Working Group of the Distributed National Electronic Resource )DNER).

This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/01435129710166482. When citing the article, please cite: Hazel Woodward, Fytton Rowland, Cliff McKnight, Jack Meadows, Carolyn Pritchett, (1997), “Electronic journals: myths and realities”, Library Management, Vol. 18 Iss: 3, pp. 155 - 162.

Hazel Kyrk’s recognised contributions include a shift in analytic focus from production to consumption, pioneering work to measure household production as part of family income, empirical studies of family behaviour, and contributions to policy. But her account of ‘wise’ consumption and its intersection with ‘high’ living standards is not well understood. The three aims of this chapter are to explain ‘wise’ consumption across Kyrk’s three major books, to consider its role in Kyrk’s empirical studies, and to explain why it fell into oblivion. Tackling what Wesley Mitchell described as the ‘most baffling of difficulties’, Kyrk explained what constitutes a family’s ‘good’ in a manner that was critical of mere emulation. Her 1923 book required that wise consumption include new and personal elements. Her 1929/1933 book detailed five qualitative criteria (balance between interests, full and varied experiences, originality, rational sources of satisfaction, and the use of scientific information). But her 1953 book weakened this normative language, reflecting Margaret Reid’s view that Kyrk’s account was too demanding. Although Kyrk felt wise consumption avoided paternalism, her peers disagreed (Hoyt, 1938/1945; Reid, 1938/1945). We close with some problems with Kyrk’s account and a brief consideration of its continuing relevance.

The impact of the revolution in information technology on the academic community is assessed, detailing the new Joint Academic Network which will link all UK universities as well as many polytechnics and research councils with a terminal connected to JANET. The origins of the service are described and future benefits forecast.

In the years following the publication of A Theory of Consumption (1923), Hazel Kyrk’s book became the flagship of the field that would later be known as the economics of consumption. It stimulated theoretical and empirical work on consumption. Some of the existing literature on Kyrk (e.g., Kiss & Beller, 2000; Le Tollec, 2020; Tadajewski, 2013) depicted her theory as the starting point of the economics of consumption. Nevertheless, how and why it emerged the way it did remain largely unexplored. This chapter examines Kyrk’s intellectual background, which, we argue, can be traced back to two main movements in the United States: the home economics and the institutionalist. Both movements conveyed specific endeavors as responses to the US material and social transformations that occurred at the turn of the 20th century, notably the perceived changing role of consumption and that of women in US society. On the one hand, Kyrk pursued first-generation home economists’ efforts to make sense of and put into action the shifting of women’s role from domestic producer to consumer. On the other hand, she reinterpreted Veblen’s (1899) account of consumption in order to reveal its operational value for a normative agenda focused on “wise” and “rational” consumption. This chapter studies how Kyrk carried on first-generation home economists’ progressive agenda and how she adapted Veblen’s fin-de-siècle critical account of consumption to the context of the household goods developed in 1900–1920. Our account of Kyrk’s intellectual roots offers a novel narrative to better understand the role of gender and epistemological questions in her theory.

After several years of in‐house development to meet its needs for automated serials control, cuts in staff and resources led Loughborough University to look to commercially‐available packages to further its automation plans. The MicroLinx package from Faxon was selected. The functionality of the system is described, and an assessment of performance given. Loughborough will soon change to BLCMP as part of a wider automation strategy, not without some regrets.