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The London and South‐Eastern Library Region (LASER) facilitates interlibrary lending in London and South East England. It has access to some 40 million volumes and through its union catalogues is responsible for 215,000 Interlending requests per annum. This paper describes the background to the automation of LASER'S referral activity. It also gives details of the mini‐computer system which was eventually installed and in which over 1,000,000 titles are now recorded. Careful monitoring over the last two years has demonstrated a number of advantages over the manual system which preceded it. Bibliographical checking has been reduced by 25% and cost containment has exceeded expectations. The next stage in LASER'S development will be the provision of on‐line access to a number of the Bureau's main users.

Adapting to change is never easy, particularly when everything is moving so fast that one has less and less time to devote to thinking about the transition process. We are all rather like white water canoeists: carried on rapid waters in a small and fragile boat — in danger of being either sunk or left on the bank — and, with head over paddle, unable to see very far ahead. The change always seems to be external and it is difficult to answer such questions as what change and for what purpose and even if we knew the answers it is unclear to what extent we are capable of affecting the outcomes. What might be helpful is to examine some of the undercurrents that are propelling us forward, affecting our work and our perceptions of our professional role.

VINE is a Very Informal Newsletter produced three times a year by the Information Officer for Library Automation and financed by the British Library Research & Development Department. It is issued free of charge on request to interested librarians, systems staff and library college lecturers. VINE'S objective is to provide an up‐to‐date picture of work being done in U.K. library automation which has not been reported elsewhere.

Boisot’s I‐space is used as a framework to explain the comparative success of computer‐based tools in information scanning and dissemi‐ nation, and the failure to support problem areas in the process of knowledge creation, especially where this involves interactions within user groups. Recent research indicates that process‐based studies are likely to be productive, and that there is a useful overlap between information science and computer science interests and methods.

Provides a checklist of factors to be considered when deciding on the use of a minicomputer for library housekeeping routines‐operating systems, languages, computer capability. Outlines the approach to software development in relation to library characteristics. Costs of packages and collaborative systems, and ways of reducing costs are considered.

Procedures are described for the systematic assessment of tenders including verification of functional scope, response characteristics in interactive systems and robustness to equipment failure.

The choice of strategy and the evolution of policy for electronic publishing as an aid to information dissemination are at present complicated by the variety of technical options and by uncertainty about the proper balance between relatively high risk innovative and more predictable conservative approaches. This paper is intended to provide a set of ‘route maps’ through the technical options available now and in the near future, and to indicate the criteria which would guide choice of technology for various application categories and investment priorities. A lucid and accessible guide to the publication and availability of scientific and technical papers will be found in Line, 1992; this paper has been followed in several places below, but Line's discussion of the impact of new technology on publishers is not repeated.

System designers concerned with bibliographic storage and retrieval systems have, in the past, followed one of three approaches — simple data structures, with the handling of the inherent complexity of bibliographic data embedded in the programs; free text (inverse file) systems of which the ‘online database’ systems may be seen as a specialised extension; and structured database (DBMS) methods, of which some MARC systems are a special subset. The form of storage of the bibliographic data affects not only the efficiency of retrieval by various fields of the record, but also the space used in storage, the cost of maintenance and addition of new material, and especially, the nature of the retrieval language and the flexibility of response to users' needs. The choice of design approach involves study of each proposed application, and guidelines are offered for consideration in matching functional requirements with the varying strengths and weaknesses of the software techniques. Hybrid database structures offering both free text and DBMS features are becoming acceptable, at least for small systems, and the likely paths for future development are noted.

A project to develop a national academic union catalogue for the 49 universities and major teacher training colleges of Indonesia has completed its design stages, and procurement of software and computing equipment will follow. The operational centre, will share a site in Dépok with the University of Indonesia. Early phases of implementation will concentrate on the 12 Discipline Service Centres where expertise and resources are concentrated in centres of excellence for selected subjects, to enable all students and researchers to share in this investment. In the course of the design studies, an examination was made of the library automation needs of a major university, Universitas Gadjah Mada, to ensure compatibility between national plans and end user requirements in library automation as a whole. The use of CD‐ROM is proposed as a distribution medium for the union catalogue of at least 500,000 titles. Pilot studies will be made in parallel with retrospective conversion of existing catalogues, to check out CD‐ROM production routes and explore approaches to subject indexing using multiple schemes and in several languages.