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THE Reference Department of Paisley Central Library today occupies the room which was the original Public Library built in 1870 and opened to the public in April 1871. Since that date two extensions to the building have taken place. The first, in 1882, provided a separate room for both Reference and Lending libraries; the second, opened in 1938, provided a new Children's Department. Together with the original cost of the building, these extensions were entirely financed by Sir Peter Coats, James Coats of Auchendrane and Daniel Coats respectively. The people of Paisley indeed owe much to this one family, whose generosity was great. They not only provided the capital required but continued to donate many useful and often extremely valuable works of reference over the many years that followed. In 1975 Paisley Library was incorporated in the new Renfrew District library service.

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Tenn. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.

AFTER AN ABSENCE of some months I returned to the pages of NEW LIBRARY WORLD, half expecting to find a mixture of ‘How I did reorganisation good’ and ‘The penny has just dropped’, depending upon the luck and/or influence of contributors. I was not disappointed, but, in a class apart, it was sad to read Philip Hepworth's account of humiliation and unfair treatment. (‘Defeat’, January NLW). He was not alone. One's faith in the essential fairness of the local government appointment system, built up over many years, was shattered in weeks. It is to the eternal discredit of the Library Association that during the agonising months of 1973/74 the dubious practices of certain local authorities were not challenged.

In January of this year I was engaged by the Social Science and Government Committee of the Social Science Research Council ‘to carry out a broad review of the present position regarding the provision of printed ephemera in the social sciences in national, university, public and specialist libraries in Great Britain’. In this paper I should like to give an account of some of the more important findings of my research and to offer for discussion a number of recommendations designed to rationalize the acquisition of these important primary sources, to improve access to them, to provide an effective means of acquainting researchers with their existence and location, and to ensure that future library policies are compatible with the known and potential needs of social scientists.

I want to start by thanking the Committee for giving me the honour of presenting the first paper to the newly formed Aslib Social Sciences Group. This coincides with the uneasy lull between publication of the Report of the National Libraries Committee and the Queen's Speech to Parliament. We do not know yet if the Government intend to legislate for the new national library structure which the Dainton Committee say we should have. What we do know is that a Dainton‐based Bill might well turn out to be a lost opportunity for the social sciences.

AS Canadians themselves will quickly inform you, this is a big, young country—Great Britain would fit into a small part of Alberta, large stretches of which are still not accurately recorded on large scale maps. Indeed, I listened to radio reports of a search for two aircraft on the first morning we were there. One aircraft (a helicopter) had been missing in the North Western Territories with a Calgary man aboard for two weeks and was eventually found crashed; the other, missing for two days, was a Cessna seaplane which had run out of fuel and punctured a float as it landed close to the shore of the Great Slave Lake. The occupants were rescued by air from this largely uncharted waste.

When this work was completed, sixteen years ago, interest in library history was much smaller than it is today. Even so, by virtue of its theme and its scholarship, Dr Aitken's thesis deserved formal publication much sooner. As some readers of Library Review will know, since 1964 the text has been available on microfilm and in Xerox copies of the original typescript, but grateful as we should be to the Microfilm Association of Great Britain for venturing where the established publishers of books on librarianship feared to tread, it is a relief to have this invaluable history in orthodox form as a sturdy, portable, well‐printed volume.

THE idea of a central service and supplies organisation for libraries—a “Library Centre”— such as exist abroad and are described in Library Supply agencies in Europe, is like most ideas in librarianship, not a new one, even taking into account the establishment of Norway's Biblioteksentralen over 60 years ago in 1902, which at that time was called Folkeboksamlingenes Ekspedisjon. This idea, like so so much else, seems to have originated in the fertile brain of Melvil Dewey, taking its final and lasting form as the Library Bureau, established by Dewey himself in 1882.

Not only is it our primary duty as librarians to direct our clients to the information they require, it is also our greatest source of satisfaction. By comparison, the chores of book selection, of cataloguing, classifying and the rest are dull and tedious. Without performing them efficiently, of course, we stand little chance of succeeding in our essential purpose; so we are right to consider them important and to seek constantly to improve our competence and develop new techniques to assist us in carrying them out. It is inconceivable that we could operate without adequate, appropriate and well ordered collections, no matter what form their contents may take. At the same time, there is a very real risk that the demanding technical operations of running libraries may absorb too much of our energy and prevent us from developing a wider expertise in the practise of our profession. Do we, for example, spend enough time finding out what exists elsewhere so as to equip ourselves to exploit more fully the resources of other libraries on behalf of our clientele?

THE greatly increased interest in historical studies since the second world war has been, I hope, a welcome challenge to librarians, but it has been very difficult to meet it. That the librarians of our new universities should have had little research material to offer was only to be expected. Unfortunately, research scholars have discovered that our older libraries were also deficient, that source materials had either not been purchased, in the years when they were readily available, or had been acquired only to be discarded at a later date. Recently, therefore, both old libraries and new have found themselves in competition for a small and dwindling supply of out‐of‐print publications.