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“Integration” in this project focuses on both technical integration and organizational integration to bring a form of coherence and unity to the support and delivery of information services. Immediate success in integration did not happen. After six years, the Integrated Information Center is still evolving. Unexpected progress has been made with the end‐users. The technological issues have progressed very well. However, the organizational issues have been the most difficult to manage.

Beware of “Info‐Smoke” warns Art Plotnick in a recent American Libraries editorial. It clouds the meaning and purpose of libraries by embroiling them in the “world's hottest commodity”—information. “The information age” or “the information society” are clichés used with abandon by many librarians. “Information” is the buzzword for grant applications, articles, and new names for libraries and library schools. As Plotnick rhetorically asks, “Who isn't in the information business?”

“Public librarians are not interested in collection development issues.”

Reports on the new union catalogue in Hong Kong, expected to make savings in international interlending traffic. Argues that international interlending is an expensive business, and who should pay has become a hotly debated topic. Shows that before charges can be made, detailed analysis of lending traffic is necessary to prevent emotional judgments. Offers up the Australian SAIL Project as one way to collect such data. Concludes that the conflict between archival responsibilities and research needs is not easy to resolve and needs co‐operation between various professional bodies.

Each special collection starts out as a core assemblage of books. As the collection's size increases, its quality (it is assumed) does as well. If a library is lucky, it will have a bibliographer in charge of such a collection: someone knowledgeable of the ins and outs of his or her discipline; someone who keeps “current with a discipline's investigations and monitor[s] its evolutions.” In reality, however, the person in charge of developing a particular collection often may not have a good scholarly foundation in the subject, particularly in a public library, where there is less of a tradition of hiring subject specialists as bibliographers than there is in academic libraries. Once a collection has grown considerably in size and scope, and has benefitted from the tastes and choices of a number of bibliographers of varying backgrounds and qualifications, it becomes necessary to assess the quality of the collection. One practical way to evaluate and build a collection, which can be used by those who do not possess a thorough scholarly foundation in the subject in which they collect, is outlined below.

The Scholar's Workstation project at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville employs recent and developing technology to provide timely, convenient remote‐site access to information. The project serves four on ‐ and off‐campus sites associated with environmental studies. A station at each site includes an IBM‐compatible personal computer connected to the campus network to access electronic information resources and network tools. Graduate students from the School of Information Sciences serve as onsite team members who provide research assistance, technical assistance, and instruction. The project successfully tests a model for future library service, in which the workstations supply onsite access to information as an electronic branch library.

The purpose of this paper is to efficiently use as few sample points as possible to get a sufficiently explored design space and an accurate optimum for adaptive metamodel-based design optimization (AMBDO).

A parameterized lower confidence bounding (PLCB) scheme is proposed in which a cooling strategy is introduced to guarantee the balance between exploitation and exploration by varying weights of the predicting error and optimum of a metamodel. The proposed scheme is investigated by a set of test functions and a structural optimization problem, in which PLCB with four kinds of cooling control functions are studied. Moreover, other infill criteria (such as expected improvement and its extension versions) are taken into comparison.

Results show that the proposed PLCB (especially PLCB with the first cooling control function) based AMBDO method can find the optimum with fewer evaluations and maintain good accuracy, which means the proposed PLCB contributes to the excellent efficiency and accuracy in finding global optimal solutions.

The parameterized version of the lower confidence bound metric is proposed for AMBDO, typically used in the context of adaptive sampling in efficient global optimization.

Reports on the issues raised in the OCLC Users Council meeting of 1991. Discusses the changing roles of special, academic, and public libraries, OCLC finances and alliances, MAPS acquisition and services, the Z39.50 technical standard, the progress of PRISM and the new network, and other business of the meeting.