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Total Quality Management (TQM) will have major implications for the internal audit function. Argues that TQM concepts, such as people empowerment, are incompatible with traditional notions of compliance with prescribed internal controls, policies and procedures. Suggests that the fundamental principles which govern the practice of internal audit are incompatible with TQM environments. Examines a number of scenarios to assess the impact of TQM on the internal audit function. These issues may offer a basis for the conduct of further research.

Argues that total quality management (TQM), with its emphasis on people empowerment, is incompatible with financial– and compliance‐based internal auditing. Examines the implications of TQM for internal auditors in New Zealand manufacturing companies. The empirical evidence suggests that one‐third of the companies examined do not have an internal auditing function. Nevertheless, in firms that do have an internal audit function, internal auditors make an important contribution to TQM. Internal auditors in these companies participate fully in quality programmes and they are less likely to be concerned purely with the propriety of financial systems. Arguably, this change in focus will have major implications for the future training and education of internal auditors. Concludes that unless the internal audit function responds proactively to the challenges of TQM, firms may look to other agencies to perform quality systems reviews.

THE Fifty‐First Conference of the Library Association takes place in the most modern type of British town. Blackpool is a typical growth of the past fifty years or so, rising from the greater value placed upon the recreations of the people in recent decades. It has the name of the pleasure city of the north, a huge caravansary into which the large industrial cities empty themselves at the holiday seasons. But Blackpool is more than that; it is a town with a vibrating local life of its own; it has its intellectual side even if the casual visitor does not always see it as readily as he does the attractions of the front. A week can be spent profitably there even by the mere intellectualist.

ALL the auguries for the Bournemouth Conference appear to be good. Our local secretary, Mr. Charles Riddle, seems to have spared neither energy nor ability to render our second visit to the town, whose libraries he initiated and has controlled for thirty‐seven years, useful and enjoyable. There will not be quite so many social events as usual, but that is appropriate in the national circumstances. There will be enough of all sorts of meetings to supply what the President of the A.L.A. describes as “the calling which collects and organizes books and other printed matter for the use and benefit of mankind and which brings together the reader and the printed word in a vital relationship.” We hope the discussions will be thorough, but without those long auto‐biographical speeches which are meant for home newspapers, that readers will make time for seeing the exhibitions, and that Bournemouth will be a source of health and pleasure to all our readers who can be there.

Owing to the increasing debt students are accumulating to finance their tertiary study, many are having to work during term time. The aim of this study is to explore the impact of this paid employment on their study time and other aspects of their lives.

Eighty three undergraduates completed a questionnaire about their academic workload, their paid employment commitments during term time, their earnings and expenditure, and their recreational and cultural activities.

Results indicated that 81 per cent of the students held at least one job during term time for an average of 14 hours per week. The money earned was typically spent on essential living expenses. Working left less time than desired for social activities, study and recreation.

The findings are limited by the relatively small sample size of self‐selected students: mainly young, female and enrolled in Arts courses.

The results suggest that working is not always detrimental to students' academic efforts, particularly if the hours worked are manageable given their course load. Lecturers should be more aware of the busy lives students lead and try to structure assignments and course requirements to recognise this, including the scheduling of class times and the offering of study support services.

The study adds to the growing body of international data that reports on the effects of a user‐pays approach in tertiary education. There is no similar data in New Zealand.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the popular “information transmitted” interpretation of absolute judgments, and to provide an alternative interpretation if one is needed.

The psychologists Garner and Hake and their successors used Shannon's Information Theory to quantify information transmitted in absolute judgments of sensory stimuli. Here, information theory is briefly reviewed, followed by a description of the absolute judgment experiment, and its information theory analysis. Empirical channel capacities are scrutinized. A remarkable coincidence, the similarity of maximum information transmitted to human memory capacity, is described. Over 60 representative psychology papers on “information transmitted” are inspected for evidence of memory involvement in absolute judgment. Finally, memory is conceptually integrated into absolute judgment through a novel qualitative model that correctly predicts how judgments change with increase in the number of judged stimuli.

Garner and Hake gave conflicting accounts of how absolute judgments represent information transmission. Further, “channel capacity” is an illusion caused by sampling bias and wishful thinking; information transmitted actually peaks and then declines, the peak coinciding with memory capacity. Absolute judgments themselves have numerous idiosyncracies that are incompatible with a Shannon general communication system but which clearly imply memory dependence.

Memory capacity limits the correctness of absolute judgments. Memory capacity is already well measured by other means, making redundant the informational analysis of absolute judgments.

This paper presents a long‐overdue comprehensive critical review of the established interpretation of absolute judgments in terms of “information transmitted”. An inevitable conclusion is reached: that published measurements of information transmitted actually measure memory capacity. A new, qualitative model is offered for the role of memory in absolute judgments. The model is well supported by recently revealed empirical properties of absolute judgments.

OUR good custom, as we deem it, to wish our readers a larger measure of happiness and success than heretofore we repeat for 1947. There are many signs in the libraries to give encouragement to the hope that they, the libraries, are now so well established everywhere that the old evils of complete disregard, penury and restriction will not recur and that, gradually but surely, the aims and the purpose for which we stand will be realized. That they may be so for all readers of The Library World is, we believe, the best possible New Year wish.

WE begin a new year, in which we wish good things for all who work in libraries and care for them, in circumstances which are not unpropitious. At times raven voices prophesy the doom of a profession glued to things so transitory as books are now imagined to be, by some. Indeed, so much is this a dominant fear that some librarians, to judge by their utterances, rest their hopes upon other recorded forms of knowledge‐transmission; forms which are not necessarily inimical to books but which they think in the increasing hurry of contemporary life may supersede them. These fears have not been harmful in any radical way so far, because they may have increased the librarian's interest in the ways of bringing books to people and people to books by any means which successful business firms use (for example) to advertise what they have to sell. The modern librarian becomes more and more the man of business; some feel he becomes less and less the scholar; but we suggest that this is theory with small basis in fact. Scholars are not necessarily, indeed they can rarely be, bookish recluses; nor need business men be uncultured. For men of plain commonsense there need be few ways of life that are so confined that they exclude their followers from other ways and other men's ideas and activities. And, as for the transitoriness of books and the decline of reading, we ourselves decline to acknowledge or believe in either process. Books do disappear, as individuals. It is well that they do for the primary purpose of any book is to serve this generation in which it is published; and, if there survive books that we, the posterity of our fathers, would not willingly let die, it is because the life they had when they were contemporary books is still in them. Nothing else can preserve a book as a readable influence. If this were not so every library would grow beyond the capacity of the individual or even towns to support; there would, in the world of readers, be no room for new writers and their books, and the tragedy that suggests is fantastically unimaginable. A careful study, recently made of scores of library reports for 1951–52, which it is part of our editorial duty to make, has produced the following deductions. Nearly every public library, and indeed other library, reports quite substantial increases in the use made of it; relatively few have yet installed the collections of records as alternatives to books of which so much is written; further still, where “readers” and other aids to the reading of records, films, etc., have been installed, the use of them is most modest; few librarians have a book‐fund that is adequate to present demands; fewer have staffs adequate to the demands made upon them for guidance by the advanced type of readers or for doing thoroughly the most ordinary form of book‐explanation. It is, in one sense a little depressing, but there is the challenging fact that these islands contain a greater reading population than they ever had. One has to reflect that of our fifty millions every one, including infants who have not cut their teeth, the inhabitants of asylums, the illiterate—and, alas, there are still thousands of these—and the drifters and those whose vain boast is that “they never have time to read a book”—every one of them reads six volumes a year. A further reflection is that public libraries may be the largest distributors, but there are many others and in the average town there may be a half‐dozen commercial, institutional and shop‐libraries, all distributing, for every public library. This fact is stressed by our public library spending on books last year at some two million pounds, a large sum, but only one‐tenth of the money the country spent on books. There are literally millions of book‐readers who may or may not use the public library, some of them who do not use any library but buy what they read. The real figure of the total reading of our people would probably be astronomical or, at anyrate, astonishing.

THE following list of errata, adjustments and revisions of the actual classification itself, represents all that it has been deemed necessary to note in the way of such alterations, and the changes have been suggested by the experience of users and the discoveries of various librarians. Those who use the scheme should have the changes noted in an interleaved copy of the book, and others may find it desirable to do likewise, pending the appearance of a revised issue which will be published in the near future. Most of the changes are self‐explanatory, and their meaning can be ascertained at once by reference to the S.C. itself. Suggestions and notes of errors will be very gratefully received, as it is only by the vigilance and practical working of many minds that a classification scheme can ever arrive at even reasonable accuracy and completeness.

LIBRARIES, in common with all other public institutions, must be faced with the uncertainty that arises from the inconclusive results of the recent General Election. We are not intimately concerned with parties and it is held that librarians should eschew them altogether as they have duties to, are the servants of, all. This consideration applies more to the public librarian than to the special one. Be that as it may, the change must postpone, we imagine, our chances of the new Public Libraries Act, because a new general election is probable in a very short time. Meanwhile, there is always uncertainty as to public expenditure and, although we do not expect anything drastic, it is hardly likely that our centenary year will see the beginnings of the library progress for which some had hoped. Most local rate‐budgets have, fortunately, been fixed by now.