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The term “medical” will be interpreted broadly to include both basic and clinical sciences, related health fields, and some “medical” elements of biology and chemistry. A reference book is here defined as any book that is likely to be consulted for factual information more frequently than it will be picked up and read through in sequential order. Medical reference books have a place in public, school, college, and other non‐medical libraries as well as in the wide variety of medical libraries. All of these libraries will be considered in this column. A basic starting collection of medical material for a public library is outlined and described in an article by William and Virginia Beatty that appeared in the May, 1974, issue of American Libraries.

Describes an approach to real‐time expert systems for integrated network management. Presents an overview of expert systems technology, proceeding to develop the requirements for a real‐time system in network management. Describes a system being developed (1989) by Pacific Bell. Describes NETREX, a prototype real‐time system, aimed at automatically maintaining Pacific Bell′s internal data networks. Concentrates on an application for solving problems with travel tickets in real time.

Through means of an empirical study of service recovery in US retail banking this paper aims to examine the link between satisfaction and various recovery strategies.

A total of 310 bank customers responded to a survey addressing customer demographics, levels of satisfaction, types of recovery strategies, and service recovery employees. Frequencies, chi‐square analysis and correspondence analysis were used to analyze the data.

The findings show no significant difference in recovery strategies or satisfaction by customer age, gender, or tenure with bank. However, the degree of customer satisfaction was strongly influenced by the type of recovery strategy used by the bank. The results indicate that recovery efforts are best directed toward empathic listening and fixing the problem rather than apologizing or making atonement.

This study of service recovery in US retail banking provides useful information on the link between satisfaction and various recovery strategies.

THE second annual Rotating‐Wing Aircraft Meeting was again held under the auspices of the Philadelphia Chapter of the Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences. The sessions were of considerable interest and were well attended. Many of the leading American aeroplane designers were present, including Grover Loening, Igor Sikorsky, and T. P. Wright.

THE improvement in the British standard of living is generally desired. Politicians have not only subscribed to that ideal but some of them have indicated the rate at which we should advance. There are, however, certain trends in the country's economic life which must be reversed if we are to make any progress in that direction.

The purpose of this paper is to compare women's mentoring experience in nine countries within the Americas, and to explore linkages between personal characteristics, mentoring practices, mentoring functions, and consequences of being mentee.

A total of 1,146 successful women are questioned about their mentoring experiences as a mentee: 105 from Argentina, 210 from Brazil, 199 from Canada, 84 from Chile, 232 from Mexico, 126 from the USA, and 190 from three countries in the West Indies (Barbados, Jamaica, and St Vincent).

Most of the women have more than one mentor. Across all countries mentoring practices are more strongly linked to career mentoring function while the age and gender of the mentor are more strongly linked to psychosocial mentoring. Mentoring from the perspective of mentee has the same directional relationship with situational and individual variables, but the significance of those relationships vary by country. A possible cultural difference is detected between Spanish and non‐Spanish speaking countries on the issue of mentoring practice.

The fact that the paper focuses only on successful women in this paper means the findings are not necessarily generalizable to other groups of women or men. The paper is also limited because mentoring functions are constrained to two: psychosocial and career. There may be more functions that mentoring could fulfill for the mentee.

Companies' interest in fostering mentoring among their members, particularly women, should be aware that different mentoring functions are influenced by different factors. For example, formal mentoring programs appear to have a greater impact on career mentoring functions than on psychosocial mentoring functions. To support women in their careers, companies should institute formal mentoring programs; this is especially important in South American countries. Moreover, mentoring programs must be designed to be adaptive since the analyses indicated that there are significant differences by country in terms of many mentoring issues.

In the literature review, the paper finds linkages between culture, mentoring practices, characteristics of mentors and mentees, and mentoring functions, but no evidence that these linkages have been studied with a group of professionally successful women from different American countries, particularly non‐English speaking American countries.

It was stated earlier that the hardest to change behaviours are those which are:

The purpose of this paper is to assess the extent of climate change likely to be manifested in the MENA region using statistical tools as well as outputs from physics‐based General Circulation Models (GCMs).

Atmospheric temperature and precipitation primarily capture climate change features and are considered the drivers of other manifestations of climate change such as rises in sea‐level, tropical cyclone intensities, severe floods, prolonged droughts, and retreating ice. Data on atmospheric temperature and precipitation have been statistically analysed for trend, distribution and variability in this study. Long‐range prediction is then made using time series analysis. Long‐range projections have also been made by many investigators using physics‐based GCMs and the Fourth Assessment Report of IPCC provides a summary. IPCC projections are not indisputable because of some inherent limitations of GCMs. A comparative study is made between statistical predictions and IPCC projections, as well as forecasts from some GCMs specifically applied to the region, to develop a more reliable forecast scenario. Water resources projects are quite vulnerable to changes in atmospheric temperature and precipitation amounts. The various aspects of planning, design and management of water resources projects which are likely to be influenced by climate change are discussed.

There is considerable variability in atmospheric temperature and precipitation in recent observations but if the variability is filtered out and the underlying trend extrapolated it is found that there is in general an agreement between IPCC projections and statistical predictions. For rise in atmospheric temperature projections made from many GCMs applied to the region, as well as projections summarised in the Fourth Assessment Report of IPCC, appear to be good estimates to be included in design considerations. For precipitation, statistical predictions are perhaps a better choice because GCM projections are less reliable with precipitation since associated meteorological processes occur at a much smaller scale than the grid size of a GCM. For low‐lying coastal regions sea‐level rise and more frequent extreme climatic events such as tropical cyclones add to the dimensionality of design considerations especially for infrastructure design.

This paper presents a comparative study of possible climate change in the long‐term between physics‐based model projections and statistical predictions. This should provide greater insight into climate change that is expected in MENA and reduce uncertainty, thereby instilling greater confidence in water resources planners and practitioners to incorporate climate change aspects into decision making. This research is believed to be particularly helpful because of scant research work done on this part of the globe on climate change.

This issue is a selected bibliography covering the subject of leadership.