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Aarhus Kommunes Biblioteker (Teknisk Bibliotek), Ingerslevs Plads 7, Aarhus, Denmark. Representative: V. NEDERGAARD PEDERSEN (Librarian).

Single-family houses are a common form of housing in Europe. Most were built in the context of the suburbanization after World War II and are now facing challenges arising from generational changes as well as increasing living and energy standards. According to the hypothesis of this paper, in several EU regions, single-family houses may face future challenges arising from oversupply and lack of adaptation to current demand. To examine this, the paper analyses the present situation and discusses the prognosis for the challenges described above regarding the three neighbouring north-western European countries Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands, based on available data and a review of country-specific characteristics of housing markets as well as national policies. Despite an impending mismatch between demand and supply, planning policies still support the emergence of new single-family houses. The comparison of Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands shows the growing polarization between shrinking and growing regions and central and peripheral sites apparent at different stages in the three countries. While a high rate of vacancies is already registered for some regions in Germany, in the Netherlands this phenomenon can only be seen near the borders and in villages within the Randstad conurbation. In Belgium also, this phenomenon is not yet widespread, but in some suburban neighbourhoods dating from the 1950's and 1960's more and more single-family houses are becoming more difficult to sell, indicating an emerging mismatch between supply and demand. This article proposes some instruments which enable municipalities to intervene in single family housing neighbourhoods which are largely dominated by private ownership. These instruments are not yet widely established in single-family housing neighbourhoods but that may become important in the future.

Presents over sixty abstracts summarising the 1999 Employment Research Unit annual conference held at the University of Cardiff. Explores the multiple impacts of globalization on work and employment in contemporary organizations. Covers the human resource management implications of organizational responses to globalization. Examines the theoretical, methodological, empirical and comparative issues pertaining to competitiveness and the management of human resources, the impact of organisational strategies and international production on the workplace, the organization of labour markets, human resource development, cultural change in organisations, trade union responses, and trans‐national corporations. Cites many case studies showing how globalization has brought a lot of opportunities together with much change both to the employee and the employer. Considers the threats to existing cultures, structures and systems.

This paper reports on an evaluation of the ‘Hy Vong Moi’ (New Hope) program aimed at providing emotional, physical and cultural support to new parents of Vietnamese origin living in the Greater Dandenong area, Melbourne, Australia, and who are experiencing problems relating to drug use within their families. Six young Australian Vietnamese women participated in the program. Data were collected via questionnaires, focus groups, diaries and the case worker’s journal. Analysis was ongoing in keeping with a participatory research approach. All the women who participated in the program, involving the setting up of a parents/mothers playgroup as well as provision of education and support, reported very positively on the program. All agreed that the formal help they received had made an enormous difference in their lives and was assisting them to integrate into Australian culture with potentially positive benefits for their children. The additional support through the parents/mothers playgroup allowed formation of new friendships, the sharing of experiences and the acquisition of new skills, including parenting skills. All wanted the program and the parents/mothers playgroup to continue as a means of providing further assistance to them and others.

There has been a massive investment in the installation of online catalogs: in selection, in the supporting infrastructure of terminals and networks, in catalog record conversion, in training, and, lately, in linking online catalogs with other online systems. In contrast, the state‐of‐the‐art of the functionality of online library catalogs has advanced little in the past few years. Rather it has been a matter of existing systems being upgraded towards the functionality of the better systems and of refinements being added. It is time for a further advance in online catalog design. We believe that the next generation of online catalogs should and will have features such as those discussed and illustrated in this article.

Investigates ways in which computer technology can enable people with a hearing and/or speech impairment to communicate. These range from telecommunication devices for the deaf (TDDs) to software designed to teach deaf children how to read and write in English (often their second language!). Other new technology includes software that converts English into American Sign Language vocabulary, and under development is a system which will facilitate communication between a hearing person and a person with a combination of hearing/visual or hearing/speech impairment.

Places the concept of “national order” in the context of seventeenth century Europe, describes its characteristics and relates it to mercantilism, i.e. using economic activity to serve the interests of the nation. Outlines the ideas of one merchant of this time, quoting from his writings to illustrate his beliefs in the need for a favourable balance of trade, use of idle resources, minimization of consumption etc. Contrasts his “patriotic economics” with modern ideas (e.g. the principle of comparative advantage) but sees some similarities, e.g. in the recurring trade disputes between the USA and Japan.

BY February most of the parties, which are a gracious feature of modern libraries, are over. They arise from Staff Guilds, which now in most libraries associate the workers, and some of them are on a large scale. We have been represented at only a few of these but there seems to be a great fund of friendliness upon which the modern librarian can draw nowadays. An interesting one was that of the National Central Library Staff which, by a neighbourly arrangement, was held at Chaucer House. A reunion has been held of old and new members of the Croydon Staff Guild and no doubt there were many others. One New Year party was a small but notable dinner at Charing Cross Hotel where the 100th issue of The Library Review was toasted eloquently by the President of the Library Association and amongst the guests were Mr. C. O. G. Douie who was secretary of the Kenyon Committee of the 1927 Library Report and well‐known librarians and journalists. To us it was notable for the assertion by Mr. R. D. Macleod that amongst the young writers were too many who wrote glibly but without that research which good professional writing demanded; but he was sure that where intelligent industry was shown any article resulting would find a place in library journals.

MID‐SEPTEMBER, with the summer gone irrevocably, allows the librarian a fortnight of reflection time before the strenuous interests of autumn and winter become active. That is, if he returns stimulated in body and mind from a reasonable holiday and does not become immersed immediately in the almost compelling series of meetings of librarians arranged for the last fortnight of September and for October. For the student members the Birmingham Summer School remains in session until the 20th; for their elders ASLIB will confer at Swanwick from the 19th to 21st, and, in the same week‐end at Buxton, there will be the conference on library work for children; and, a week later, 26th to 29th, the University and Research Section will occupy Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford. The arrangements for October are set out in the L. A. Record. Their profusion embarasses many librarians. It is only natural that, as librarianship extends, every organized part of it becomes keenly aware of its individuality and, as the profession today grows more and more conference‐minded, few can keep step, save in a general way, with more than a fraction of the meetings arranged. Some effort is made by the L.A. and by librarians to preserve and strengthen the basic unity of all librarianship, but otherwise the diversity is great.

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.