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Most development processes have the effect of putting innovation in a straitjacket. This is because they encourage heavy up‐front planning followed by sticking to the plan, which imposes considerable constraint on change during a project. Unfortunately, change in product development is linked inescapably to innovation. The more innovative the product, the more likely it is that the team will need to make changes during its development. Therefore, for these more volatile projects, developers need more product development flexibility – the ability to make changes even relatively late in development, without being too disruptive – than is possible with standard development processes. The aim of the book by Preston Smith, Flexible Product Development, is to help companies build a process and apply tools and approaches that are more tolerant of change – ones that accommodate and even embrace change as a natural consequence of working in the innovative domain where change is the norm. The aim of this paper is to explore this issue

The paper reviews the book by Preston Smith, Flexible Product Development.

The paper finds that the book helps companies build a process and apply tools and approaches that are more tolerant of change.

The paper provides a useful review of the material in Preston Smith's Flexible Product Development, which will help companies build a process and apply tools and approaches that accommodate and even embrace change as a natural consequence of working in the innovative domain where change is the norm.

Rapid prototypes will gain acceptance in business only to the extent that they provide bottom‐line business value. Thus, this paper guides engineers wishing to “sell” rapid prototyping in helping them to operate from a business perspective. Presuming that the relative value of rapid prototypes is in their speed, I show how to identify, quantify and exploit timesaving opportunities by using rapid prototypes to greatly shorten product development cycles. The article first illustrates how to calculate the cost of delay for a development project so that we have a means of measuring the business value of the time saved. Then I show where to look for leveraged time‐savings that will yield greater benefit than just the time saved directly in building the prototype faster. By addressing associated process and cultural change issues, the paper guides the rapid prototyper in setting up an environment in which the identified business advantage will actually be realized after the new system is installed.

The authors detail how strategists can identify key areas for economic leverage in the development cycle and what can be done to exploit them.

IN this issue we conclude our symposium on Modern Library Planning, and although it is not as complete as we could wish, it has certainly proved to be one of the most interesting subjects we have been able to deal with in recent years. We regret that lack of space has prevented us from including some interesting details about new libraries, and that we have laid ourselves open to the criticism of over‐crowding. We hope, however, that we shall be able, from time to time, to add further material as the occasion warrants. We had hoped to obtain a description of the Central Library Extension of the Hull Public Libraries, but this has, unfortunately, proved impossible. Lancashire County Library, too, is constructing four new branch libraries, an account of which we should have liked to include. Plymouth may be mentioned as still another library of which the material was not ready in time for our symposium. Also, we are sorry to have had to omit some of the illustrations which librarians have been kind enough to offer us for reproduction. In spite of these omissions, however, we have been able to gather together much that is new and interesting in modern planning, and one of the points that is well worth notice is the willingness of librarians to experiment in new ideas, even if conservatively.

As the world jumps from the Industrial Age to the Information Age in what is, from a historical sense, a cultural nanosecond, the very concept of work is morphing at Warp 13 speed, the Information Revolution is coursing through the veins of corpus corporatus, having as significant an effect on the American workplace as did Ford's assembly line. The principal currency of the new workplace—what one knows and what one does with that knowledge—is effectively splitting the nation's workforce into two social classes. A professional class (“information brokers”) holds the skeleton key to the executive bathroom, while a service class is increasingly relegated to the broom closet. As the ability to manipulate data emerges as the new definition of skilled labor, blue‐collar workers, who represented the heart of the postwar middle class, are fast becoming an endangered species. With polarization of the workplace accelerating into the next millennium, the parachutes most likely to open will be those somehow connected to managing information.

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

THE Fifty‐First Conference of the Library Association takes place in the most modern type of British town. Blackpool is a typical growth of the past fifty years or so, rising from the greater value placed upon the recreations of the people in recent decades. It has the name of the pleasure city of the north, a huge caravansary into which the large industrial cities empty themselves at the holiday seasons. But Blackpool is more than that; it is a town with a vibrating local life of its own; it has its intellectual side even if the casual visitor does not always see it as readily as he does the attractions of the front. A week can be spent profitably there even by the mere intellectualist.

THE article which we publish from the pen of Mr. L. Stanley Jast is the first of many which we hope will come from his pen, now that he has release from regular library duties. Anything that Mr. Jast has to say is said with originality even if the subject is not original; his quality has always been to give an independent and novel twist to almost everything he touches. We think our readers will find this to be so when he touches the important question of “The Library and Leisure.”