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Current issues of Publishers' Weekly are reporting serious shortages of paper, binders board, cloth, and other essential book manufacturing materials. Let us assure you these shortages are very real and quite severe.

SEPTEMBER was free from large‐scale visits of bombers, and the arrangements the Associations made for meetings were realized. The Library Association, challenging the criticism that it was making no programme for the peace, requested its branches to produce ideas. Thus, those who made the criticism were asked to define their terms, as it were. The first outcome was a joint meeting of the London and Home Counties Branch and the A.A.L. which was held at the delightful new St. Marylebone Library on September 24th. Another joint meeting in London was that at the Institution of Electrical Engineers on September 26th, when the British Society of International Bibliography and A.S.L.I.B. actually met in quite substantial numbers to discuss the indexing and listing of periodicals. These activities are expressions of confidence in the future by librarians and those concerned with libraries. If the immediate results are not dramatic they keep us in good heart, and we hope will lead to other meetings.

ELSEWHERE in this number we list libraries which have Esent us copies of their annual reports which we are glad to have. Now and again we are able to elaborate on these, but in the present issue that has not been possible. We would say, however, that these reports are deserving of the attention of librarians generally, and of students at the library schools. They are records of work in progress, and they do suggest the development of library policy. The best of them are of textbook value.

The following bibliography focuses mainly on programs which can run on IBM microcomputers and compatibles under the operating system PC DOS/MS DOS, and which can be used in online information and documentation work. They fall into the following categories:

An existing model for calculating online search costs has been converted to electronic form using the spreadsheet package MULTIPLAN. The electronic version of the model proves to be an extremely fast and powerful tool for updating search‐costs matrices for a large number of databases on different host systems. The model itself may be useful for investigating the microeconomics of online information retrieval.

Finance is the lifeblood of an economy. Businesses require capital in order to start up, and usually require additional resources to maintain or expand their activities. In some cases, they may simply reinvest their profits. But expansion on a significant scale may require more than this. Thus, businesses may also seek to borrow funds or to solicit investments in return for the investor's share of future profit. One of the basic means by which this latter strategy is pursued in industrial societies is for businesses to solicit investments from the public through the initial public offering of shares, and for subsequent buying and selling of shares by investors who expect the value of the shares in question to rise or fall. Securities markets are thus integral to a nation's economic system.

The relationship between organisation size, technology implementation, and organisational culture is examined. Thirty‐five American and Canadian manufacturing organisations were surveyed concerning their approach to implementing statistical process control (SPC) technology. Organisations were classified as either large or small and hierarchic or non‐hierarchic. Approaches to implementing SPC were measured and compared among the four groups (large hierarchic, small hierarchic, large non‐hierarchic and small non‐hierarchic). Results indicated that both the size of the organisation and its culture determine how that organisation goes about implementing technological change. Larger organisations use inter‐departmental liaisons, temporary task forces, and permanent implementation teams more than smaller organisations in implementing new technology. Non‐hierarchic organisations appear to use goal and direct contact mechanisms at higher levels than hierarchical organisations when it comes to innovation and change. Results also indicate that there is more in common in the area of technological implementation between large and small businesses, and hierarchical and non‐hierarchical organisations than is often suggested.

In entrepreneurship research, self‐reporting using questionnaires is often used as a replacement for the projective test, the thematic apperception test (TAT). Posits that this study is to examine whether an objective test, Cezarec‐Marks personal scheme (CMPS) can be used as a replacement measure for TAT. States that the subjects in the investigation are people in higher education; two measures of the same individuals, over a period of seven months, were carried out, the average age at the first test was 21.3 years, and an analysis of correlation shows no correlation (r(t1) = 0.0556, n = 89, r(t)2 = 0.0733, n = 71) between need for achievement with TAT and need for achievement with CMPS. Confirms the findings of the study that the hypothesis of TAT cannot be replaced by CMPS.

As an alternative to the standard p and np charts along with their various modifications, beta control charts are used in the literature for monitoring proportion data. These charts in general use average of proportions to set up the control limits assuming in-control parameters known. The purpose of the paper is to propose a control chart for detecting shift(s) in the percentiles of a beta distributed process monitoring scheme when in-control parameters are unknown. Such situations arise when specific percentile of proportion of conforming or non-conforming units is the quality parameter of interest.

Parametric bootstrap method is used to develop the control chart for monitoring percentiles of a beta distributed process when in-control parameters are unknown. Extensive Monte Carlo simulations are conducted for various combinations of percentiles, false-alarm rates and sample sizes to evaluate the in-control performance of the proposed bootstrap control charts in terms of average run lengths (ARL). The out-of-control behavior and performance of the proposed bootstrap percentile chart is thoroughly investigated for several choices of shifts in the parameters of beta distribution. The proposed chart is finally applied to two skewed data sets for illustration.

The simulated values of in-control ARL are found to be closer to the theoretical results implying that the proposed chart for percentiles performs well with both positively and negatively skewed data. Also, the out-of-control ARL values for the percentiles decrease sharply with both downward and upward small, medium and large shifts in the parameters. The phenomenon indicates that the chart is effective in detecting shifts in the parameters. However, the speed of detection of shifts varies depending on the type of shift, the parameters and the percentile being considered. The proposed chart is found to be effective in comparison to the Shewhart-type chart and bootstrap-based unit gamma chart.

It is worthwhile to mention that the beta control charts proposed in the literature use average of proportion to set up the control limits. However, in practice, specific percentile of proportion of conforming or non-conforming items should be more useful as the quality parameter of interest than average. To the best of our knowledge, no research addresses beta control chart for percentiles of proportion in the literature. Moreover, the proposed control chart assumes in-control parameters to be unknown, and hence captures additional variability introduced into the monitoring scheme through parameter estimation. In this sense, the proposed chart is original and unique.

A simple model has been developed that enables the online searcher to calculate the total cost of a search at any point during the search. The parameters of the model are simply the online search time and the number of references that the searcher intends to print. The model can be represented graphically or in a discrete tabular form, as the searcher requires, and should be applicable to bibliographic databases on most retrieval systems. It should be particularly useful to searchers who have to work within financial constraints.