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Modern reference service is marked by four distinctive features: (1) the willingness and ability of librarians generally to give reference aid; (2) a staff devoted exclusively (or largely) to reference work; (3) reference collections stored on open shelves in rooms planned as reference quarters; and (4) ready guides to library resources (such as a dictionary catalogue and a precise scheme of classification).

The purpose of this article is to investigate how political skill relates to career decisions and occupational fit.

The study utilizes undergraduate business majors to determine how their level of political skill influences their choice of career/major in a Holland‐type framework. Hypotheses are tested using logistic regression.

The paper finds that there is general support for the proposition that political skill influences the pursuit of social and enterprising majors/careers.

While choice of major is a strong indicator of occupational choice, it is not a direct measure of individual careers. However, the results provide insight regarding how organizational politics relates to individual careers and suggests the need for further study.

The paper provides a valuable additional factor for assessing career fit.

This paper is the first to critically examine organizational politics with reference to career choices rather than career outcomes and provides insight into how these affect satisfaction and success.

NATURAL aptitude, training, experience: these are the three factors necessary for competence in any vocation. But having stated the ideal, what is the reality? Recruitment to libraries is quite as haphazard as it is to any other job. It is best when unemployment is rife. It is poorest when full employment is achieved. The assistant arrives more by accident than design. He is usually an amenable, adaptable creature, ready enough to learn and make the most of the estate to which he has been called. Thus it is that training becomes paramount, and education in librarianship the prime duty of the Library Association.

THE story of the B.A.O.R. Mobile Libraries starts in July, 1945, when the N.A.A.F.I. agreed to send a W.V.S. mobile library to Germany filled with what was then thought to be enough books for three months, and manned by one W.V.S. helper. Members of the Women's Voluntary Services had been in the B.A.O.R. for some time, working on services' welfare in the N.A.A.F.I. clubs and mobile canteens, but this was the first time that the thought of a mobile library had been entertained. The whole thing was to be an experiment and if it proved successful more libraries were to follow.

NUMBERS of the public need education not only in the use of a library, but in the very facilities provided by the library service. Numbers of teachers up and down the country, with the co‐operation of the librarians, have done much to bring the library to the knowledge of school children, but there are still too many people who imagine that the facilities which the library provides end with their school‐days. There are still vast numbers of young and old who imagine that the library service after school‐days is not free, or else “not for the likes of us.” They do not understand the system of fines, the question of the renewal of books, and they certainly know nothing about the help they could receive from the librarian in selecting their books. Up to the present the method of helping people to read has been largely the method of borrowing books from the library, or else placing books in the buildings where people congregate. Librarians have been pestered by clubs and societies of all kinds, for loan boxes of books, and many a librarian foresees that if this system continues the library itself will be denuded of all books except those which few people in their senses would ever want to read. Moreover, pressure is being placed upon librarians to develop their work in separate compartments. They are being urged to develop a children's library, and very beautiful and imaginatively conducted children's libraries have been arranged in many areas. The success of these has encouraged many well‐meaning people to demand that libraries shall provide equally good facilities for youth libraries. However, though one does not doubt their ability to do this, and to do it no less imaginatively, one might well pause to consider where such departmentalism may lead us. Who is to say whether in a few years' time people may not demand old age pensioners' libraries, or housewives' libraries, or libraries for people over forty?

All items listed may be borrowed from the Aslib Library, except those marked, which may be consulted in the Library.

ON the face of it the Report of the Royal Commission on Local Government in Greater London might seem to be of no concern to authorities outside the area, but it is certain that all concerned with local government have their eyes firmly glued on the eventual fate of the Report. For what happens in Greater London could well be a pointer for local government reform in the rest of the country. Librarians are among the many people who have an intense interest in this, despite the fact that only one of the Report's 1,011 paragraphs dealt with libraries.

Contrary to what might be expected from the rather pessimistic view of library literature taken in another paper in this issue, the production of this annual review of the literature intended for special librarians becomes progressively more difficult, owing to the growth in the volume of the material from which the selection must be made. The aim of this survey has always been to pick out from the literature generally available in Great Britain in the year in question those items likely to be of practical assistance to library and information workers—particularly those with little experience or training working in small libraries. It therefore lists important reference works and tools which the special librarian ought to know about, even if he doesn't possess them, but omits all articles of purely theoretical interest, and those which describe practice in large libraries, except where they are capable of application in small libraries. Much of the increase in the volume of literature is due to an increase in the number of works of reference, many produced under the encouragement of bodies such as Unesco, but there is also a definite tendency for a closer link between theory and practice in much of the writing on library work. In these circumstances, the selection of a list of a hundred items becomes more than ever a matter of personal judgment, on which no two persons could be expected to agree, but it is hoped that all items included will prove useful, and that all sections of the field are fairly represented.

As the field of history expands with each passing decade, so does the number of reference works on historical events. Many fine reference works have been released in recent years, and the following is an annotated list of some of those that librarians ought to consider purchasing. The materials included were published in the decade beginning with the American Bicentennial. The scope of the bibliography is also limited to certain subjects deemed appropriate by the author, and excludes a number of excellent works that were considered too limited (bibliographies of individuals, for example), even though they might well be proper purchases for a library's reference collection. Also excluded, generally, are those works that are revisions of earlier works. The range of subjects included within the larger context of “American history” is somewhat dependent on the materials actually published, and the author has attempted to select only those materials that have received favorable reviews.

The singular success of Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. in rescuing IBM from dismemberment and destruction in terms of his shifting the institutional memory of 300,000 employees from corporate politics to customer service focus, has been expalined memory management explain failures as well?

Chacko (memory management in survival decisions of corportions 1956‐2003, Barmarick Publications, UK, 2006) published a sequence of ordered procedures (protocol) of memory management: memory management disequilibria dimensions (MD)² protocol. This paper applies the protocol to the birth and death of the GO computer.

The memory management disequilibria dimensions (MD)² protocol analyzes accurately the Jerry Kaplan narrative of founding on August 14, 1987, the GO corporation to AT&T firing the last remaining employees of EO, the spin‐off of GO on July 29, 1994. (MD)² Step 1: Chief Ntrapreneur officer will to win became a casualty, founder CTO/CNO Kaplan reflecting that money wasn’t the problem, but loss of faith of the chief financial officer on the viability, of the Software VP on the development schedules, of the CEO on market momentum, and of the CTO/ECO on the “stick‐to‐itveness” of the new management team.

The habit patterns of thought and action that make a corporation/country unique are instructed/inscribed in individual/institional memory. This paper demonstrates that the (MD)² protocol explains both success and failure, providing a basis to make memory management effective.