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Green Light was developed to enable service providers to implement the National Service Framework for Mental Health (NSF MH), and asks how good your mental health services are for people with a learning disability. A multi‐agency user and carer project in Hampshire has evaluated and improved the quality of existing service provision for adults with learning disabilities who also have a mental health problem.

This paper looks at the outcomes of a mental health education group for patients in a high secure setting. The effects measured included assessments of knowledge about schizophrenia and its treatments, insight into the illness, drug compliance and attitude, and self esteem. The results from the measures were broadly consistent with findings from previous studies in non‐forensic settings: notably, that patients were able to acquire knowledge about their illness and its treatment and also that psycho‐education could have a positive impact on their attitudes towards taking medication and their levels of insight.The study outlines the structure and content of the group sessions and the teaching methods used. It offers discussion on the findings and concludes with recommendations about high secure service issues that may have relevance for wider service settings.

I RECALL a seminar on the problems of teaching history where one speaker began by saying that until he was asked to prepare a paper, he had been cheerfully unaware any problems existed.

WE write on the eve of an Annual Meeting of the Library Association. We expect many interesting things from it, for although it is not the first meeting under the new constitution, it is the first in which all the sections will be actively engaged. From a membership of eight hundred in 1927 we are, in 1930, within measurable distance of a membership of three thousand; and, although we have not reached that figure by a few hundreds—and those few will be the most difficult to obtain quickly—this is a really memorable achievement. There are certain necessary results of the Association's expansion. In the former days it was possible for every member, if he desired, to attend all the meetings; today parallel meetings are necessary in order to represent all interests, and members must make a selection amongst the good things offered. Large meetings are not entirely desirable; discussion of any effective sort is impossible in them; and the speakers are usually those who always speak, and who possess more nerve than the rest of us. This does not mean that they are not worth a hearing. Nevertheless, seeing that at least 1,000 will be at Cambridge, small sectional meetings in which no one who has anything to say need be afraid of saying it, are an ideal to which we are forced by the growth of our numbers.

LIBRARIES in War have, alas, been too often the theme of this and other library magazines owing to the times in which men and women of middle age have had to live. To‐day, even younger ones can see some reflection of the atmosphere, because they have been brought up in a pervading spirit of threats and preparations; insomuch—and this is the tragedy of i t—they ask “What is the good of preparing for life in this world when we are likely to be bombed out of it at any moment?” There is much good, because, even if the ultimate tragedy came, England and the majority of us would survive; and the world must go on. It is a descent from this perhaps grand attitude to the thought that less money may be available for libraries for the time being. We know that rates are rising in many places, owing to unemployment relief needs and A.R.P. demands, but there is the consolation that last year many new libraries were opened. It may be a result of the truth that never are libraries more needed than in hours of stress.

In these days of jargon and slang, to the purist it must seem that little is described by its real name, that is, during conversation. Most people refer to the city as “the smoke” and the city‐dweller's pseudonym for the country is “out in the sticks”, which, of course, could mean that “the sticks” are kindling to a fire that has not been lit, with the city “smoke” as the end‐product of the fire that is burning up those who rush hither and thither in its bedlamite streets and ugly office blocks. The cottage, the church and inn no longer completely fill the lives of the villagers; they now have piped water supplies, electricity and telephones; deep freezers, colour television and cars; they have moved closer to the city standards of comfort and convenience without losing any of the enduring qualities which make them different. And the countryman is very different to the town‐dweller—in outlook, habit and countenance. Even the villager who works in the town and city, and nowadays there are many of them, would not change his home in the country for a flat or terrace house in a mean street, despite the long journeying to and fro. At one time, it had to be a special type of girl who chose a home in these rural settings, with few or perhaps no neighbours and no corner‐shop, but now more and more are realizing that life in a village is easier on the whole family.

“Since films attract an audience of millions, the need and appetite for information about them is enormous.” So said Harold Leonard in his introduction to The Film Index published in 1941. The 1970's has produced more than enough — too much — food to satisfy that appetite. In the past five years the number of reference books, in this context defined as encyclopedias, handbooks, directories, dictionaries, indexes and bibliographies, and the astounding number of volumes on individual directors, complete histories, genre history and analysis, published screenplays, critics' anthologies, biographies of actors and actresses, film theory, film technique and production and nostalgia, that have been published is overwhelming. The problem in film scholarship is not too little material but the senseless duplication of materials that already exist and the embarrassing output of items that are poorly or haphazardly researched, or perhaps should not have been written at all.

AS part of its three year research programme to draw up a code of practice and standards for the planning, organisation and lay‐out of metropolitan city libraries, the International Association of Metropolitan City Libraries (INTAMEL) met in Gothenburg in April 1969 to consider research studies and papers prepared during the previous year and to examine technically new city library developments and, later, in Stockholm and Copenhagen.

War is, perhaps, mans greatest sin, which is not the same as saying war is never necessary — when an army of Argies shot up a small Royal Marine unit in the Falklands and occupied the land area against the will of the English speaking people, what does a self‐respecting country do? Well, the only answer is to ask what you would do if a renegade mob smashed into your house, abused your family and refused to leave. Let's face it, if you had not the muscle to eject them, the number dialled would be 999 and a squad car with a couple of boys in blue would be round double quick to do their duty.

This paper aims to explore some initial and necessarily broad ideas about the effects of the world wide web on our methods of understanding and trusting, online and off.

The paper considers the idea of trust via some of the revolutionary meanings inherent in the world wide web at its public conception in 1994, and some of its different meanings now. It does so in the context of the collaborative reader‐writer Web2.0 (of today), and also through a brief exploration of our relationship to the grand narratives (and some histories) of the post‐war West. It uses a variety of formal approaches taken from information science, literary criticism, philosophy, history, and journalism studies – together with some practical analysis based on 15 years as a web practitioner and content creator. It is a starting point.

This paper suggests that a pronounced effect of the world wide web is the further atomising of many once‐shared Western post‐war narratives, and the global democratising of doubt as a powerful though not necessarily helpful epistemological tool. The world wide web is the place that most actively demonstrates contemporary doubt.

This is the starting place for a piece of larger cross‐faculty (and cross‐platform) research into the arena of trust and doubt. In particular, the relationship of concepts such as news, event, history and myth with the myriad content platforms of new media, the idea of the digital consumer, and the impact of geography on knowledge that is enshrined in the virtual. This paper attempts to frame a few of the initial issues inherent in the idea of “trust” in the digital age and argues that without some kind of shared aesthetics of narrative judgment brought about through a far broader public understanding of (rather than an interpretation of) oral, visual, literary and multi‐media narratives, stories and plots, we cannot be said to trust many types of knowledge – not just in philosophical terms but also in our daily actions and behaviours.

This paper initiates debate about whether the creation of a new academic “space” in which cross‐faculty collaborations into the nature of modern narrative (in terms of production and consumption; producers and consumers) might be able to help us to understand more of the social implications of the collaborative content produced for consumption on the world wide web.