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THE ORGANISING COMMITTEE of the British Library was set up in June 1971 following the acceptance in April 1970 by the government of the recommendations of the Dainton Report on the national libraries and the consequent White Paper (Cmnd 4572) in January 1971. The committee is to plan the organisation of the library and develop and co‐ordinate its policy, and is clearly of the greatest importance, not only to the national libraries but to all libraries through the bibliographic and research services the British Library will undertake. What do we know of the work of this committee, which has now been in existence for a year?

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effects of an intervention to reduce the energy density of meals in the workplace food environment.

This study was conducted on a cosmetics manufacturer that employed 243 people, and was divided into three phases: diagnostic evaluation; development and testing of modifications to the energy density of the preparations; and evaluation of the results obtained. To evaluate the menus, the Meal Quality Index was used. This index consists of five components ranging from 0 to 20 points: “Adequacy of availability of vegetable and fruit”, “Carbohydrate availability”, “Total fat availability”, “Saturated fat availability” and “Menu variability”. The Kruskal‐Wallis test was used to evaluate differences in phases 1 and 3.

The classification, according to the scores for the Meal Quality Index, showed that there was an improvement in the menus, with a decrease in inadequate menus from 31 per cent to 5 per cent and in menus needing improvement from 44 per cent to 29 per cent.

Changes that are relatively simple to implement and reproduce regarding meal production may contribute towards controlling the obesity epidemic, through discouraging the obesogenic environment, especially among captive healthy customers such as workers who use the food services in their workplaces.

This study aims to examine consumers’ preferences among four calorie-reducing approaches – resizing, reformulation, substitution and elimination – and to understand what motivates consumers to order low-calorie food using the theory of planned behavior (TPB) as a model.

A conceptual model was developed based on the TPB with an additional construct of food choice motives. A total of 467 responses were collected. Descriptive statistics, multiple regression and ANOVA were used in the data analysis.

Consumers have a clear preference for substitution and elimination. The pattern that ingredients with higher calories were modified at a higher priority indicated that consumers might improve food decisions based on calorie information.

Restaurants should allow substitution or elimination of certain ingredients from menu items. Including more low-calorie sides will cost restaurants less than changing the main dish. A menu item on an entrée form is more amenable to modification for decreased calorie content as consumers have high taste expectations for popular traditional foods (e.g. burgers and pizza).

This is the first study to investigate consumers’ preferences among the four popular calorie-reducing approaches. A novel “Build Your Own Meal” approach was used in the questionnaire to allow the participants to choose from more than 150 ingredients, which compensated for personal preferences, thus mitigating possible limitations associated with studies of this kind, and was a good indicator of the participants’ actual ordering behavior.

In this paper content analysis is used to examine the lobbying positions of publicly listed companies making submissions on ED 49, Accounting for Identifiable Intangible Assets. A number of content analysis measures are used in an attempt to gain additional insights into the strength of lobbying positions held. The influence of debt contracting and political costs variables upon lobbying position on capitalisation and amortisation of identifiable intangible assets is investigated. Significant relationships are found with the explanatory variables interest coverage, company size, effective tax rate and membership of a politically sensitive industry. These relationships are most consistently observed when lobbying position is measured using more basic content analysis techniques, such as sentence counts and counting the number of supporting arguments presented in submissions. Use of apparently more sophisticated techniques of content analysis fail to perform as well, possibly due to the introduction of greater subjectivity to the process.