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The purpose of this paper is to present an overview of the history of heritage inventories in England and look at the requirements for a future vision of networked, digital heritage inventories to support heritage protection in England as outlined in the Heritage Information Access Strategy (HIAS). The strategy, led by Historic England, the UK Government-funded agency for heritage in England, is proposing a more formalized network where the prime sources of data relating to non-designated heritage assets will be the local authority historic environment records.

This paper looks at the historic development of the inventories from paper-based publications to digital data sets and the proliferation of data. The Monument Inventory Data Standard Heritage will also be discussed in the context of providing a common framework.

The present loose network presents several challenges for the multiple organizations maintaining similar data sets on disparate IT software, namely, the duplication of content, ownership of content and different approaches to recording practice and standards. There is a need for common data standards and controlled vocabularies in order to facilitate data exchange and interoperability across the network.

The findings are based on the common experience of heritage inventory providers in England, but are relevant to any country where multiple inventories exist. It is anticipated that the implementation of the HIAS will provide a future-proofed environment for a shared national inventory.

This paper presents the HIAS in its historic context. It is hoped that this may be of value to inventory programmes from outside the UK.

Presents the writer’s personal review of construction and design of mainly domestic buildings of the Second Millennium. After a brief historical commentary a summary of the main defects the surveyor is likely to encounter in buildings of each period of the millennium is given. The importance of local knowledge is emphasised and as an example the main problems encountered in buildings of the West of England are presented.

To meet the emerging demand for fine-grained annotation and semantic enrichment of cultural heritage images, this paper proposes a new approach that can transcend the boundary of information organization theory and Panofsky's iconography theory.

After a systematic review of semantic data models for organizing cultural heritage images and a comparative analysis of the concept and characteristics of deep semantic annotation (DSA) and indexing, an integrated DSA framework for cultural heritage images as well as its principles and process was designed. Two experiments were conducted on two mural images from the Mogao Caves to evaluate the DSA framework's validity based on four criteria: depth, breadth, granularity and relation.

Results showed the proposed DSA framework included not only image metadata but also represented the storyline contained in the images by integrating domain terminology, ontology, thesaurus, taxonomy and natural language description into a multilevel structure.

DSA can reveal the aboutness, ofness and isness information contained within images, which can thus meet the demand for semantic enrichment and retrieval of cultural heritage images at a fine-grained level. This method can also help contribute to building a novel infrastructure for the increasing scholarship of digital humanities.

Reports that have reached us of the installation of Sir Philip R. Morris as President of the Library Association on January 28th assure us of the contribution he may make to the Association. As the retiring President, Mr. Oldman said, and as we know, his main interest has always been education and, as the Association has many projects in that field and some problems yet unsolved, he welcomed Sir Philip especially in that direction; but our new President has much experience of libraries in spite of his disclaimer of qualifications in our direction. He is a Carnegie Trustee and, unofficially, he connects us again with the body to which our profession owes so much and, as for lack of experience, one who has been Director of Education for Kent and therefore the ultimate official chief of the great County Library system there, cannot lack it. From what we hear of this speech—which we hope will be published in its complete but all too short length in the L.A. Record—we look ahead with confident pleasure to the Address he will give us at the Southport Conference in September.

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

Philip Rambaut practises what he preaches. The chairman of Richard Johnson and Nephew tells Ken Gooding that, for the bold industrialist, there has never been a better time to invest—and he is spending £2½ million on modernizing his Manchester plant.

AFTER the trenchant paper by Mr. A. O. Jennings, read at the Brighton meeting of the Library Association, and the very embarrassing resolution which was carried as a result, one can only approach the subject of the commonplace in fiction with fear and diffidence. It is generally considered a bold and dangerous thing to fly in the face of corporate opinion as expressed in solemn public resolutions, and when the weighty minds of librarianship have declared that novels must only be chosen on account of their literary, educational or moral qualities, one is almost reduced to a state of mental imbecility in trying to fathom the meaning and limits of such an astounding injunction. To begin with, every novel or tale, even if but a shilling Sunday‐school story of the Candle lighted by the Lord type is educational, inasmuch as something, however little, may be learnt from it. If, therefore, the word “educational” is taken to mean teaching, it will be found impossible to exclude any kind of fiction, because even the meanest novel can teach readers something they never knew before. The novels of Emma Jane Worboise and Mrs. Henry Wood would no doubt be banned as unliterary and uneducational by those apostles of the higher culture who would fain compel the British washerwoman to read Meredith instead of Rosa Carey, but to thousands of readers such books are both informing and recreative. A Scots or Irish reader unacquainted with life in English cathedral cities and the general religious life of England would find a mine of suggestive information in the novels of Worboise, Wood, Oliphant and many others. In similar fashion the stories of Annie Swan, the Findlaters, Miss Keddie, Miss Heddle, etc., are educational in every sense for the information they convey to English or American readers about Scots country, college, church and humble life. Yet these useful tales, because lacking in the elusive and mysterious quality of being highly “literary,” would not be allowed in a Public Library managed by a committee which had adopted the Brighton resolution, and felt able to “smell out” a high‐class literary, educational and moral novel on the spot. The “moral” novel is difficult to define, but one may assume it will be one which ends with a marriage or a death rather than with a birth ! There have been so many obstetrical novels published recently, in which doubtful parentage plays a chief part, that sexual morality has come to be recognized as the only kind of “moral” factor to be regarded by the modern fiction censor. Objection does not seem to be directed against novels which describe, and indirectly teach, financial immorality, or which libel public institutions—like municipal libraries, for example. There is nothing immoral, apparently, about spreading untruths about religious organizations or political and social ideals, but a novel which in any way suggests the employment of a midwife before certain ceremonial formalities have been executed at once becomes immoral in the eyes of every self‐elected censor. And it is extraordinary how opinion differs in regard to what constitutes an immoral or improper novel. From my own experience I quote two examples. One reader objected to Morrison's Tales of Mean Streets on the ground that the frequent use of the word “bloody” made it immoral and unfit for circulation. Another reader, of somewhat narrow views, who had not read a great deal, was absolutely horrified that such a painfully indecent book as Adam Bede should be provided out of the public rates for the destruction of the morals of youths and maidens!

One of the nine thought provoking essays assembled by Peter Vergo in the recently published The New Museology (Reaktan Books, ISBN 0 948 462 035 hardback, ISBN 0 948 462 043 paperback) is “The Quality of Visitors' Experiences in Art Museums” in which Philip Wright discusses the lack of awareness among museum personnel of what exactly their institutions are doing, and indeed should do, in a period when “films, television, video and pop access photography have inevitably altered, if not actually undermined the hierarchy of images that museums aim to display”. Few curators have had professional surveys of their audience undertaken, some have dismissed colleagues' changes as pandering to commercialisation, and invest in sophisticated technology and displays in such a way as to distract from the integrity of the objects in their care.

Since its inception this publication has been known as M300 and PC Report, a name that is simple and explicit, but not particularly durable. The OCLC M300 workstation is no more. Long live the M310 and the M220 (see page 2). Computer hardware and software is in a permanent state of change and OCLC should be applauded for taking advantage of more powerful equipment such as the Model 310, particularly as the cost per unit of computer muscle continues to decline.