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SCHEMES FOR the national library services of developing countries make the British library world seem positively victorian by comparison. Two factors, however, are likely to be agents of change in the next few years. At the apex of the pyramid, the proposals for the British Library will rationalise the British Museum, the National Central Library, the National Lending Library for Science and Technology and the British National Bibliography complex. At more local levels, the re‐organisation of local government in England will ensure more effective provision of public library services under unitary control.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the statements by the chairman and CEO in BP plc’s Annual Report 2010 for linguistic evidence of reader positioning. This is based on the premise that reputational fallout from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill would have heightened the need for such positioning to repair the company’s legitimacy.

Applying Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics (SFL) framework, a comparative register analysis was undertaken of the respective statements of the chairman and CEO of BP plc. This was informed by corpus analysis of these statements, of comparative statements from industry competitors and of two larger-scale corpora constructed from the chairman and CEO statements extracted from the annual reports of 25 FTSE100 companies.

The findings suggest that readers’ perceptions are likely to be shaped by the statements of the chairman and CEO of BP plc in the company’s 2010 annual report, but similarities and differences are apparent in the way this positioning is engineered. Broader corpus analysis hints that these similarities and differences are not localised to BP plc.

The analysis relies on the assumptions that the chairman and CEO are the writers of each piece. As with prior research, questions of intent on the part of the corporate authors and impact upon target readers remain unanswered.

This paper demonstrates and highlights the issue of reader positioning through lexico-grammatical choices in corporate disclosures.

This paper makes a contribution to the literature by demonstrating how reader positioning may be engineered through lexico-grammatical choices in corporate disclosures. This paper further responds to a call from Sydserff and Weetman (1999, 2002) for interdisciplinary approaches to investigating corporate narrative reports involving linguistics, through foregrounding Halliday’s SFL framework as an analytical tool.

This paper describes the qualitative evaluation of Imagine East Greenwich (IEG), a series of arts/health projects developed as part of a regeneration programme on two housing estates in a London borough. The evaluation seeks to identify (through consultation with various stakeholders) indicators for measuring the impact of arts/health on communities, and to itemise some of the key factors that appeared to influence the success of IEG's arts/health projects. The paper reflects on some of the challenges that attend arts/health evaluations and, in so doing, contributes to ongoing debates about the role and value of the arts, notably in deprived and fragmented communities.

The liability of a master for the acts of his servant or agent is a well‐established principle of many branches of English Law. It is in fact as old as the Common Law itself and is considered to have originated in the responsibility of a master for hired menials who had no legal capacity and were part of the household for which the master had to answer in every way. In the law of tort, especially the tort of negligence, it is still firmly entrenched and the rule is that a master is liable for any tort which the servant commits in the course of his employment (Winfield). The servant is also liable and a servant, for the purpose of vicarious liability, is one whose work is under the control of another and “in the course of employment” includes any act committed as an incident to something the servant is employed to do. Apart from statutory modifications, the rule has been perceptibly changing in its applications through the years, even in both directions. Originally, hospital authorities held no responsibility for acts committed by their medical staff; the responsibility was entirely the doctor's, a legal relationship, however, which was always regarded as something of an anachronism as between employer and employed. Perhaps this conception was an error stemming from an early High Court decision, but gradually the position has changed, quite apart from the National Health Service Act, 1946, towards the hospital authority's responsibility to the injured patient just as much as that borne by the officer whose failure caused the injury.

Few regret the passing of an old year, with its darkening days and cold nights, its message fading as the voice weakens. A new year always looks more attractive with hopes of better things to come, but an occasional look back over one's shoulder, as it were, is seldom completely without profit, for experience can sometimes be more potent than hope. 1968 seemed to have more than its share of uncertainties, tragedies and disasters, in this country and in the world at large. An unsure economic state, to say nothing of monetary confusion, was reflected in every field of industry and public administration, but in the field of food quality and purity control, steady progress towards a comprehensive system of food standards, of hygiene and of food additive control was maintained. In fact, the year may be seen as not an entirely unfruitful one, with one or two events which may well prove to be landmarks.

THE College of Librarianship is best considered on its own terms, as an institution unique in the history and present pattern of British library education, but its significance and probable future development can best be assessed if two external factors are kept in mind.

A Study in Organisation. Under the non‐committal title “Construction of Esso Refinery, Fawley; A Study in Organisation”, A. P. Gray and Mark Abrams tell the story of how this vast £37½ million venture was constructed in little more than two years—thanks to outstandingly efficient management both at the planning and construction stages.

THE interval between the Library Association Conference and the printing of THE LIBRARY WORLD is too brief for more than a series of impressions of it. Comment is probably preferable in our pages to mere record. The Association is publishing in the next few weeks all the papers that were read and, as we hope, the substance at least of the unwritten contributions. In this second particular reports in recent years have been lacking. A report that merely states that “Mr. Smith seconded the vote of thanks” is so much waste of paper and interests no one but Mr. Smith. If Mr. Smith, however, said anything we should know what it was he said. What we may say is that the Conference was worthy of the centenary we were celebrating. The attendance, over two thousand, was the largest on record, and there has not been so large a gathering of overseas librarians and educationists since the jubilee meeting of the Library Association at Edinburgh in 1927. So much was this so that the meeting took upon it a certain international aspect, as at least one of the non‐librarian speakers told its members, adding that it was apparently a library league of nations of the friendliest character. It followed that an unusual, but quite agreeable, part of each general session was devoted to speeches of congratulation and good‐will from the foreign delegates. All, with the possible exception of the United States, dwelt upon the debt of their countries in library matters to the English Public Libraries Acts and their consequences. Even Dr. Evans, in a very pleasant speech, showed that he had reached some tentative conclusions about English librarianship.

THE earliest catalogue of Cambridge University documents was compiled by Mr. William Rysley, in 1420. Most of the documents enumerated in this list are still extant. An interesting List of the Documents in the University Registry, from the year 1266 to the year 1544, was communicated to the Cambridge Antiquarian Society by the Rev. H. R. Luard, B.D., then University Registrar, on March 6th, 1876. From this, it appears that “The earliest document which the University possesses is so late as the year 1266. The earliest in the Record office is dated 16th July, 13 Hen. III., i.e. 1229. This is a permission to scholars of the University of Paris to come to England, and remain for purposes of study.”

The purpose of this paper is to explore the link between age discrimination and the injustices that have taken place in our care homes during the COVID-19 pandemic in this country. It seeks to show how destructive age discrimination is to those who live in our care homes and attempts to shake up our attitudes to older people, as the pandemic continues. It is hoped that shifts in attitude would lead to a societal revolution in care and support for older people as the pandemic shows us how the current system is breaking down.

This is a personal insight into the plight of the care home sector during the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK. The writer has worked in the field of social care and older people’s services for many years and felt compelled to share her learning and observations. This led to venturing more deeply into understanding why those who live, work and visit care homes have been so neglected and “cast into the shadows” in the face of such desperate danger. Whilst tracking the media narrative during the first wave, she attempts to apply her knowledge, in particular gained from working for Help the Aged (now Age UK) as a policy manager for Quality Care, but also draws on experiences as a social worker, commissioner and care provider from the 1980’s to the present. By “shining a light” on care homes, revealing that the darker practices that have taken place contravene the Human Rights Act 1998, it is hoped that the recognition of age discrimination will happen at every level and become better known in its application. The paper observes how deeply rooted it is in us all.

Having highlighted some shocking examples of bad practice from the authorities relating to care homes, the article concludes that Government policy on care homes from March to July 2020 was discriminatory and questions how far lessons have been learned. The legislation is in place in the form of the Human Rights Act 1998 to protect older people in care homes but is not being widely implemented at regional policy level. Government rhetoric remains far from reality Instead of redressing the gap and admitting mistakes, there is evidence at a high level of continued denial and the projection of blame on to the care homes themselves.

The author’s professional background includes meeting the founder of the Gray Panthers, Maggie Kuhn, in the United States in the 1988. This was a defining moment that gave her an original insight into age discrimination and influenced her entire career. It eventually led to her working in national policy for one of the most influential charities for older people at the turn of the millennium, Help the Aged. Here, she co-founded the My Home Life Programme (promoting quality of life in care homes). The paper offers a unique insight into why it is so challenging to achieve quality of life for older people needing care and should be of interest to policymakers, clinical commissioning groups, local authorities, older people’s care providers and carer and user organisations.