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Advanced software and hardware solutions are enabling institutions to progress from traditional asset liability management to earnings sensitivity and future market valuation across dynamically modelled balance sheets. By implementing pre‐defined management trading strategies across scenarios and through time for the portfolio, firms can not only protect themselves from risk, but also actively manage short‐term earnings against long‐term value and enhance their net worth.

With the need to expel huge amounts of non‐performing loans from their balance sheets, their share prices sinking and their credit ratings lowered, Japan’s banks are struggling to raise new capital and may face collapse. But the current crisis could have been avoided. If they had implemented rigorous liquidity risk management structures, the banks would have a clear view of their true position and could have avoided spinning into the vicious circle of a funding crisis.

Now and again a book relating to library interests comes to hand that deserves special notice, and such a work is the New York State Library School Register, 1887–1926, which was published by the New York State Library School Association, Inc., in 1959. We might have received a copy for notice earlier, but Mr. Karl Brown, the Editor of the volume, writes that he “had not thought of sending copies outside the States feeling that it might be considered a provincial book, as London sometimes tells us!” Mr. Brown has been much too bashful. We personally were most happy to receive a copy from him following an enquiry the nature of which will be explained later. In this article we begin by reviewing the book, but at a later stage we indicate by a little study of one person the unusual interest of the work to librarians in terms of library history and of the movements of librarians from one land to another.

Advances in market risk management have had a huge impact on asset liability management in recent years, enabling the most advanced institutions to analyze their balance sheet risks in a much more realistic and dynamic way. In future, as risk management develops still further and computing power increases, ALM could find itself with a new, broader function to perform.

IT would, perhaps, be in the nature of a precedent for an Editorial to THE LIBRARY WORLD not to be devoted to an analysis of some topic of, or controversy over, librarianship. Possibly recklessly, the Editor has decided on this occasion to establish that precedent.

Research has found a subgroup of conservative white males have lower perceptions of risk across a variety of environmental and health hazards. Less research has looked at the views of these “low risk” individuals in group interactions. Through qualitative analysis of a technology deliberation, we note that white men expressing low risk views regarding technologies for energy and the environment also often express high social risks around potential loss of control. We argue these risk perceptions reflect identification with corporate concerns, usually framed in opposition to government and mirroring arguments made by conservative organizations. We situate these views within the broader cultural struggle over who has the power to name and address risks.

THE year 1954 opened more brightly, in some respects, than most previous years. Salaries are better than they used to be, staffs are larger, and hours are shorter. But there is even less room for complacency or even bare satisfaction than there was forty years ago. Then, however poor was the pay and however long the hours, there was every indication that librarianship was gradually becoming recognized as a profession which in time would rank with the great professions. Principles and objectives were clear and were never lost sight of, but librarians and assistants of that day realized that the great professions were dependant, not only on principles but upon absolute mastery of technique; that no lawyer could survive who merely talked grandiloquently about the principles and objectives of his calling; that the medical man endured—and in many instances enjoyed—a severe and lengthy training in technique and practice, and that even when he became a specialist his prime need and principal qualification was absolute mastery and up to date knowledge of technique and practice in his field of specialisation. In the light of that fad a detailed study of library technique became accepted as essential, and a mass of practical and technical literature was studied and mastered by more than one generation. For examination purposes, perhaps more than for any other reason, the present generation of assistants continues that study, but there has been a change of weight. Today we hear frequently that technique is relatively unimportant and that principles and objectives are the vital essentials.

But if, my heart, you would speak of prizes won in the Games, look no more for another bright star by day in the empty sky more warming than the sun, nor shall we name any gathering greater than the Olympian.