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Nearly four years ago, the Aslib Engineering Group wanted to get acquainted with the intricacies of the report literature and some of the problems associated with it. The paper which was presented at their ‘Facets of Engineering Librarianship’ conference in 1970 needs some updating and this is the purpose of the article which follows.

The traditional scenario concerning scholarly communication envisages the authors of papers in learned journals communicating with each other by letter, and exchanging offprints of their work. Such communication permits the transfer of more highly detailed and specific information than can be published in the necessarily confined space of the journals themselves, provides scholars with news about on‐going or future investigations, and above all cements partnerships in research, furthering the formation and functioning of invisible colleges.

The BLLD is able to satisfy a growing percentage of requests for material in the humanities. Its retrospective collections and current purchasing policy, which are described in some detail, enable it to supply half of the humanities monographs requested and two thirds of the serials from stock, with increasingly high success rates for more recent material. A further 30% of monograph requests and 15% of serial requests are satisfied from back‐up libraries (including the legal deposit libraries) and other sources.