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Federal budget problems have been significant national issues throughout the 1980s. One can hardly read a newspaper or listen to the broadcast media without reference to budget‐related topics. Public opinion supports this concern. Seventy‐six percent of those responding to a Gallup Poll taken prior to the 1988 presidential election indicated they consider reduction of the budget deficit the new administration's top priority. An additional 21 percent believed it should be a medium priority. A second poll taken in late January 1989 found that 59 percent of the respondents favored a constitutional amendment that would require Washington to balance the budget. In 1985, the figure was only 49 percent.

Few areas of reference services seem to be as shrouded in fearful mystery as those of patent searching. For many librarians, the very word “patent” conjures up images of strange individuals with equally strange ideas. Some think of endless tedium in selecting from among incomprehensible classifications leading to huge lists of meaningless numbers. Still others are repelled by the notion that many inventors and patent searchers are seeking assistance with what may be expensive legal matters.

As a new century approaches, the evolving global village becomes difficult to ignore. More than ever before, the United Nations will act as both universal meeting hall and clearinghouse. Consequently, information from and about the United Nations has potential instructional and research value to a wide variety of information professionals and their patrons. For many research topics, an international perspective will enhance the information‐gathering process. Reference librarians should take advantage of this perspective whenever possible, using or referring patrons to intergovernmental organization (IGO) information. This article is intended to serve as a collection development guide to sources of United Nations information and thus help librarians attempting to cope with the lack of bibliographical control over United Nations materials.

Published by the Science and Technology Division of the Library of Congress since 1972, the Tracer Bullet series is an underused reference source available in many library and government documents collections. The Tracer Bullets cover a wide variety of subjects in the natural and physical sciences and technology. Each one is devoted to a specific topic and is designed “to help a reader begin to locate published material on a subject about which he or she has only general knowledge.” Developed in the style of a library pathfinder, each explores the resources available, listing texts, handbooks, encyclopedias, dictionaries, bibliographies, government documents, and journal articles. Addresses and telephone numbers of relevant organizations are also included as are appropriate Library of Congress subject headings to use in locating additional material.

The international business researcher in the United States faces considerable barriers to obtaining and understanding firm‐level data about foreign companies. Although the Internal Revenue Service, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Bureau of the Census, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and other government agencies collect detailed data on foreign companies doing business in the U.S., most of these data are readily obtainable only as aggregate figures. The SEC alone releases company‐specific reports for public companies trading on U.S. stock exchanges. International bodies like the United Nations Centre on Transnational Corporations (UNCTC), the Organization for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD), the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank follow the practice of individual governments in suppressing and protecting any firm‐level data, publishing only aggregate figures where those figures will not reveal the workings of individual firms. Therefore, most of the sources of data on the company level truly available to U.S. researchers are published by private information companies.

It is obvious to many librarians that requests for information on funding sources are increasing in most types of libraries. Public support programs are dwindling, and corporate profits are receding. The publishing field has responded to this need by producing a new array of tools to help grant seekers find appropriate funding sources.

We have all heard about the exponential growth in government during the past decade. What the media do not point out is the concomitant growth in the body of laws, rules, and regulations created by this “bigger” government. Certainly, reference librarians—in public and academic libraries—are aware of this trend. Average citizens, businesspeople, and students are asking more and more legal reference questions. Moreover, in my experience, the nature of these questions is shifting from the traditional areas of government and politics or even international relations, into newer areas of labor relations, the environment, and ethics.

Until the Loma Prieta earthquake of 17 October 1989, also known as the “World Series earthquake” or the “San Francisco earthquake,” many of us may have considered earthquakes a remote danger. But instantaneous television transmission from the interrupted World Series game and frightening images of the collapsed Cypress Viaduct and the burning Marina district transformed this incident from a distant disaster into a phenomenon that touched us all. The Loma Prieta earthquake was followed in December 1990 by the inaccurate but widely publicized New Madrid earthquake prediction. Despite its inaccuracy, this prediction alerted the public to the fact that the largest earthquake ever to have occurred in the United States occurred not in California or Alaska, but in Missouri, and that a large earthquake could occur there again. Americans are discovering that few places are immune to the possibility of an earthquake.

When the first edition of Poems by Emily Dickinson was published in 1890, Samuel G. Ward, a writer for the Dial, commented, “I am with all the world intensely interested in Emily Dickinson. She may become world famous or she may never get out of New England” (Sewall 1974, 26). A century after Emily Dickinson's death, all the world is intensely interested in the full nature of her poetic genius and her commanding presence in American literature. Indeed, if fame belonged to her she could not escape it (JL 265). She was concerned about becoming “great.” Fame intrigued her, but it did not consume her. She preferred “To earn it by disdaining it—”(JP 1427). Critics say that she sensed her genius but could never have envisioned the extent to which others would recognize it. She wrote, “Fame is a bee./It has a song—/It has a sting—/Ah, too, it has a wing” (JP 1763). On 7 May 1984 the names of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman were inscribed on stone tablets and set into the floor of the newly founded United States Poets' Corner of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, “the first poets elected to this pantheon of American writers” (New York Times 1985). Celebrations in her honor draw a distinguished assemblage of international scholars, renowned authors and poets, biographers, critics, literary historians, and admirers‐at‐large. In May 1986 devoted followers came from places as distant as Germany, Poland, Scandinavia, and Japan to Washington, DC, to participate in the Folger Shakespeare Library's conference, “Emily Dickinson, Letter to the World.”