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This article explores governance and information. What is governance and what are the attitudes towards it? What is the value of information? Lack of common understanding of governance as an emerging subject area and common perceptions of the subject can be misleading. Over‐reliance upon computerised information systems can fault organisational decision making and yet there is a need for “factuality” in decision‐making to underpin expert opinion or management choice. These issues, together with the influence of management and organisational culture on governance and information systems design choices, are examined.

In this article the author offers a personal view of some of the major developments during the final decade of the second millennium which have been significant to the management of records in electronic form, particularly in respect of their legal admissibility.

Having a substantial interest in one of the still leading edge fields of technology, namely electronic document management or EDM, can be very intellectually rewarding. One of the pleasures of consultancy is being able to help people. But like all counsellors or facilitators, you must suppress your own views to enable the views and skills of others to develop naturally and without prompting. Your own thoughts must not always show through.

States that, for over a decade, knowledge management (KM) has been viewed as the way forward for information management and that it has become associated with Internet technology. Reveals that experience showed that KM projects were too often attempts by information communication technology (ICT) departments to prove that they understood how information was used by their businesses when in fact and they did not. Proposes that KM did not achieve what it set out to do because it is expensive and is not functionally straightforward, creating poorly understood operational problems. Concludes that records management is now emerging as the preferred tool for information storage because it is easily understood by all, relatively low cost, highly adaptable and low in staffing costs.

Various newspapers seem to agree that the Ministry of Food will cease to exist in the course of 1953. The increase, this month, in the price to the consumer of several rationed foods, as the result of reductions in subsidies, may facilitate the abolition of rationing at an early date—and this abolition, it is considered, will attract housewives' votes to the Conservative party, in addition to securing economies in administrative costs. If Mr. Churchill and Lord Woolton remain in office and decide to abolish the Ministry of Food, what remains to be considered is the extent to which its functions will remain and to what Department they will be allotted. For the abolition of all controls is just unthinkable and would involve economic chaos. It may be that some local authorities would welcome complete independence of central supervision in the administration of Food Laws. On the other hand, they would strongly deplore the cessation of the flow of those Statutory Instruments by which standards of composition and quality are set up. Nor would all manufacturers wish to see any backsliding in the matter of the control of advertisements and labels. In a recent issue of The Pharmaceutical Journal, an unnamed manufacturer expressed the view that it would be a pity if the good results achieved by the onlightened action of the Labelling Division of the Ministry of Food were allowed to slip away, and deplored the discontinuance of the Ministry's advisory service. For myself, I have no doubt that there must also remain great need and scope for centralised activities in the matter of limiting certain imports, restricting the sale of luxury articles in short supply (for example, cream, at certain periods of the year, at least) and various other controls required for economic reasons. It would be a pity to throw away the baby with the bath‐water.

Provides direction for researchers, collection developers and other interested parties to locate sources of information on the English Lollards in the USA. Sources cited will provide researchers with a feel for the social, economic and political turmoil of the time in England and the Roman Catholic Church.

In 1981, the noted psychologist Robert Coles lectured at the University of Southwestern Louisiana on Kenneth Toole's Pulitzer Prize winning book, A Confederacy of Dunces (Coles, 1983). When asked about Dr. Coles’ interpretation of the book's central character, Ignatius J. Reilly, as a metaphor for the Roman Catholic Church, the author's mother responded, “He would be. Ignatius is a booby and a prophet” (Fletcher, 2005, p. 140). That paradoxical combination of foolishness and wisdom describes not only the Catholic Church, but also the professional role of the priest at the beginning of the second millennium. Torn between two opposing structural ideologies governing the identity of the Church and his role within it, the priest treads a fine line between buffoonery and prophecy.

Our Dublin correspondent telegraphed last night:

This outline paper stems from the shared interest of a criminologist and a scholar in business organisation in the problem of responsibility in the large and complex modern corporation. For the criminologist, this has a particular significance in the context of corporate crime; for the student of management, it opens up questions of decision making and control. For both, it raises considerations of business ethics as well as the function of law in regulating business practice. In particular, there is the central question of how an organisation can, per se, be held criminally liable, without the present requirement in English law, of identifying a ‘controlling mind’ Within it.