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Conventional wisdom has long held that senior staff in university libraries should have parity with their teaching colleagues not merely in salaries and general conditions of service but also in eligibility to participate in general university government through Senate, faculty boards and the like. The case for such participation and the benefits deriving to the university and to the library were well stated in the Parry Report twelve years ago; and in the US a whole monograph has been devoted to the topic of faculty status. That senior staff should also participate in the government of their libraries through departmental meetings, as their teaching colleagues do, is a proposition less frequently stated until more recently, in line with the increasing emphasis placed on the teaching side on participation at departmental level.

GUEST editor of this South African issue of THE LIBRARY WORLD is Hendrik M. Robinson, Director of Library Services, Transvaal Provincial Administration, Pretoria.

SIR ALAN HERBERT writing in The Spectator of 8th January, 1960, puts forward a point of view that librarians will find provocative, to say the least.

The creation of university institutions in the overseas territories connected with Great Britain has taken place very largely since the conclusion of the last war: already noteworthy achievement is an effective antidote to the depression that has overtaken us in more general matters. The need for such an impressive and timely step need scarcely be stated. With a new width of vision the rigidity of the colour bar in the countries involved has disappeared. Economically, the countries left in the relaxed ‘colonial’ system have gained in relative importance. Africa, the West Indies and South‐Eastern Asia must take the place of the great Asiatic countries which have so largely cut adrift. Yet Great Britain is hard put to it to find manpower sufficient to supply her own needs, although she must seek earnestly, even in her own interest, for the development of the immense but largely untapped resources of the overseas territories. Thus Africans, West Indians, Malayans and Chinese must find and train their own medical men and women, engineers, lawyers, school teachers, legislators, clergy, all hitherto sadly deficient in number. On a higher plane, our country has been a pioneer in the trustee policy that has taken so firm a hold on the imagination since the institution of the League of Nations in 1919: not only from relentless local pressure but as a result of real conviction we and our ‘Colonies’ are moving in nearly every case towards more and more complete self‐determination. We may be legitimately proud that in this matter and in the concurrent need for expansion in higher education we have gone far ahead of the other remaining ‘colonial’ powers.

For the Republic of Ireland, as for most European countries, the period since the Second World War has been one of growth and expansion in higher education. This has resulted partly from a growing population of young people and partly from the demand for trained manpower in response to increasing industrialisation and technological change. Total enrolment in all sectors of higher education trebled from 15,000 in 1950 to more than 45,000 in 1983, and during the same period the number of students in the universities rose from 8,000 to 27,000. The rapid increase in enrolments led to the appointment of a Commission on Higher Education which reported in 1967. Many of its recommendations have been overtaken by subsequent developments, but two central themes were that increased state investment in higher education was a precondition of social and economic progress, and that the growing demand for higher education was so large and so diverse that new institutions should be established to cope with it. Accordingly, in addition to expansion in virtually all the existing universities and colleges, two new national institutes of higher education have been established since 1970, together with nine regional technical colleges, in which the emphasis is on courses in the applied sciences and technological and business studies. As far as state investment in higher education is concerned, around 80% of the financial provision for almost all the institutions is derived from state funds. The distribution of these funds to the universities and national institutes of higher education is one of the functions of the Higher Education Authority, a body established in 1968 on the recommendation of the Commission, and whose other functions include the continuous review of the need for and provision of higher education, and the coordination of financial planning and development.

Discusses a recent amendment in Nigerian universities’ law that changed the appointments of university librarians, registrars and bursars from tenured to non‐tenured. Appointments to these posts which were formerly until retirement at 65 are now for a fixed period of five years in the first instance, renewable for another term of five years at the pleasure of the governing councils and no longer. The background to this development is given and its implications for leadership motivation, continuity of policy, issues of orderly succession and the fate of the former incumbents are explored. It concludes that in the present Nigerian context, the merit of the new order far out‐weighs its demerits in terms of the much desired attainment of full academic status for librarians and leadership motivation. However, care has to be taken to ensure the future of the former incumbents within the organisations if they are to perform selflessly during their limited tenure.

Inaugural professorial lecture delivered at Lancashire Polytechnic in May 1990. The roots of polytechnic libraries can be found both in the development of the Mechanics′ Institute movement in the 19th century and in the earlier development of university libraries. However, modern pressures, including changing learning methods and the development of the information society, lead to the changing model of the polytechnic library, centred on the user. The role of the academic library in the future will therefore be different from that in the past.

MEMBERS of the Aslib Economic and Business Information Group heard something of the objects and activities of Counter Information Services (producers of ‘anti‐reports’ on rtz, British Leyland, etc) in November. The scheduled speaker having had to withdraw at short notice, Mr Lepper manfully stepped in with a straightforward account of the origins of the organisation in a group of ‘like‐minded’ individuals with diverse backgrounds. No particular organisation was behind it, he said, and those backing it at any given time varied with the subject currently under investigation, as did the personnel—staff and volunteers— undertaking the research.

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.