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Suggests that frequent review of product sales performance is essential to the planning and control process. Investigates those products which have reached maturity or saturation stage of their product life cycle and reviews these in order to decide on their future product strategy. Evaluates the policy options available to management.

ANDREW Carnegie stands apart from all other library benefactors. No other man has given so much, or given so widely, in the cause of library progress. Although the United Kingdom was not the main recipient of his bounty, it received from him, personally, about £12 million, and considerable sums, in addition, from the Trust which he founded. It might well be expected, therefore, that his name would always be in our minds and that we would remember him more kindly than any other library benefactor. But it is not so.

Library Exemption added to Software Rental Bill in U.S. Senate. In last month's issue, I briefly mentioned the existence of U.S. Senate Bill 198, The Computer Soft‐ware Rental Amendments Act of 1989, introduced on January 25 by Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah. This Bill proposed in its original language to restrict the ren‐tal, leasing, or lending of computer software. I am happy to report that the library community responded to this potential restriction on their right to lend materials in any form; an exemption for non‐profit libraries will be included in a new version of the Bill. I think that it is appropriate to examine this issue in more detail as it is of interest to all computer users in libraries.

IN this number we make some commemoration of the twenty‐five years so happily achieved by the King‐Emperor. As our contributors show, the cardinal event of the whole of the Reign, so far as libraries were concerned, was the passing of the Public Libraries Act of 1919. The generations change rapidly, and there are few to‐day who remember acutely the penury and struggle which were involved in the fact that all public library expenditure had to be kept within “the limit of the penny rate.” It is possibly true that the average community has taken no very intelligent advantage of the breaking of its financial fetters; in no town in the British Empire can it be said that there is anything approaching generosity, let alone extravagance, towards libraries. Even in the greatest cities, where they have built fine buildings and opened them with much ceremony, the rate allocation for their maintenance is not nearly of the scale that finds acceptance, or did find acceptance, in the United States. That is because we are young people in an old country. The tradition dies hard that education is a luxury and that libraries, which in the eyes of many are only remotely related to education, are an even greater luxury. We heard it said recently that many local authorities regarded the libraries as a sort of joke, and delighted to cut down their expenditure upon them. This lugubrious way of opening our remarks upon the Jubilee is only by way of pointing out that to‐day, at any rate, we have the power to go ahead if we convince our authorities that it is desirable to do so.

FOR MANY YEARS PAST Roy Plomley has persuaded all kinds of people, celebrities every one, but not all of them just transient showbiz personalities hurtling like meteors across the firmament, to enter one of the BBC's studios and there, to the strains of Eric Coates's Blue Lagoon and the cries of sea‐birds, to confide into the microphone the gramophone records they would choose to have with them if they were marooned on a desert island. Week in, week out, listeners have been rewarded with snippets of autobiography, a little amateur philosophy, and sometimes a dabble or two in psychology, accompanied at suitable intervals by a record highspotting significant (or even insignificant) events in the prospective castaway's life. Now I would agree that music is without question the most evocative of the arts, but I would make a strong plea for literature to be regarded as a close second. Why not ‘Desert Island Bookshelf’? After all, the most famous of shipwrecked mariners, Robinson Crusoe, had the benefit of a not inconsiderable library on his island: no fewer than three Bibles, a few Popish prayer‐books, a few books of navigation, some books in Portuguese, and a number of others unspecified. Of course, there would be an odds‐on chance of hearing the latest over‐developed, over‐peroxided Hollywood starlet assure Mr Plomley that of all the Greek classics the one she read most often was little old Plato's Republic. But then every silver lining has a grey cloud attached to it somewhere or other.

Compares toy commercials in France, Germany and Italy in relation to globalisation, which is claimed to produce a uniform consumer culture. Investigates the roles performed by different territories (international, national, regional and local) in advertising directed at children of these different nationalities. Focuses on the apparent tendency towards universalism in the form and content of TV commercials aimed at children, based on a comparative analysis of 163 commercials for toys. Finds that the commercials in the three countries used the same types of persuasion, with toys linked to fantasy worlds, different depictions of boys and girls, and reference to a widely shared extra‐textual body of knowledge; international commercials were much more standardised than for other types of products, and images crossed national boundaries more easily than language, with various reinventions of voiceovers and other verbal messages. Concludes that transnational toy advertising cannot escape local obstacles linked to sociocultural variables.

When the first edition of Poems by Emily Dickinson was published in 1890, Samuel G. Ward, a writer for the Dial, commented, “I am with all the world intensely interested in Emily Dickinson. She may become world famous or she may never get out of New England” (Sewall 1974, 26). A century after Emily Dickinson's death, all the world is intensely interested in the full nature of her poetic genius and her commanding presence in American literature. Indeed, if fame belonged to her she could not escape it (JL 265). She was concerned about becoming “great.” Fame intrigued her, but it did not consume her. She preferred “To earn it by disdaining it—”(JP 1427). Critics say that she sensed her genius but could never have envisioned the extent to which others would recognize it. She wrote, “Fame is a bee./It has a song—/It has a sting—/Ah, too, it has a wing” (JP 1763). On 7 May 1984 the names of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman were inscribed on stone tablets and set into the floor of the newly founded United States Poets' Corner of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, “the first poets elected to this pantheon of American writers” (New York Times 1985). Celebrations in her honor draw a distinguished assemblage of international scholars, renowned authors and poets, biographers, critics, literary historians, and admirers‐at‐large. In May 1986 devoted followers came from places as distant as Germany, Poland, Scandinavia, and Japan to Washington, DC, to participate in the Folger Shakespeare Library's conference, “Emily Dickinson, Letter to the World.”

WHILE there is no doubt that the system of issuing books at “net” prices is of great benefit to booksellers, there is also no doubt that, unless care is taken, it is a serious drain upon a limited book‐purchasing income. A few years ago the position had become so serious that conferences were held with a view to securing the exemption of Public Libraries from the “net” price. The attempt, as was perhaps to be expected, failed. Since that time, the system has been growing until, at the present time, practically every non‐fictional book worth buying is issued at a “net price.”

Life studies are a rich source for further research on the role of the Afro‐American woman in society. They are especially useful to gain a better understanding of the Afro‐American experience and to show the joys, sorrows, needs, and ideals of the Afro‐American woman as she struggles from day to day.

A national multi‐gigabit‐per‐second research and education network known as the National Research and Education Network is to be established by 1996, according to the High‐Performance Computing Act of 1991 (P.L. 102–194) passed in December 1991. Commonly known as the NREN and referred to as the “information highway,” this electronic network is expected to provide scientific, educational, and economic benefits for the United States and to serve as the basis for an all‐encompassing National Information Infrastructure available to all citizens. The idea of the NREN began in the late 1960s in the Department of Defense and its Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) with the development of ARPANet, the first packet‐switching network. This evolved into the Internet, or Interim NREN, after the National Science Foundation (NSF) linked its national supercomputing centers with the NSFNet. The NSFNet is to be the technological backbone for the NREN, which will continue the networking begun by the Internet. Initially, the NREN is intended to interconnect researchers and resources of research institutions, educational institutions, industry, and government in every state.