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It is now forty years since there appeared H. R. Plomer's first volume Dictionary of the booksellers and printers who were at work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1641 to 1667. This has been followed by additional Bibliographical Society publications covering similarly the years up to 1775. From the short sketches given in this series, indicating changes of imprint and type of work undertaken, scholars working with English books issued before the closing years of the eighteenth century have had great assistance in dating the undated and in determining the colour and calibre of any work before it is consulted.

LIBRARY ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE affairs occupy our foreground this month of course. The Llandudno meeting will, we understand, be the last to be held in the spring. Various considerations, weighty enough, have made the early meeting undesirable. Municipal and county library authority members are occupied with elections and university and college librarians are pressed with imminent examinations. September, therefore, will hereafter be conference month, which, for those who so regard conferences, makes them a welcome extension of summer holidays. It also intrudes them into the holiday season and increases their cost and the difficulty of accommodating so large an assembly in halls and hotels.

This paper presents the findings of an investigation into a mental health promotion initiative in young offender institutions across England. The study involved a survey of staff attitudes towards mental health promotion, and surveyed practice run by these staff. Analysis of staff descriptions of mental health promotion revealed a degree of confusion and a lack of clarity over the definition of mental health and mental health promotion. The concept of a mental health promotion initiative which aimed to improve the well‐being of the general inmate and staff population was not a shared vision and not part of the core work of either health care staff or prison officers. It is recommended that any future campaigns on mental health or health promotion should have a central lead, with some flexibility to allow for the development of local initiatives, fostering local relationships and partnerships.

SEPTEMBER sees most librarians again at the daily round, although some, including those of the universities and schools, are still scattered on mountains, golf‐courses, beaches and oceans for a short while yet. To older men there is a curious feeling aroused by the knowledge that there is no Library Association Conference this month. They may, in a measure, find compensation in attending the annual meeting of the London and Home Counties Branch of the Association, which will be at St. Albans, or that of A.S.L.I.B., which has Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, as its venue. Both, by some lack of care which might have been avoided, occur on the same week‐end, September 24–26. Quite clearly the special problems of librarianship technique, such as processes, book‐selection and purchase, classification, catalogues, fines, publicity, salaries, hours, and so on almost infinitely, can no longer be discussed profitably at the Annual Meeting of the Library Association; smaller gatherings, such as these, are their fitting place. We make a suggestion to the L.A. Council, for what it is worth and without pretence to being original. It is that it should indicate to all its branches and sections the main questions to which they should devote attention, and that in due course they should produce their conclusions on them. These, being pooled, would form the basis of the L.A. Annual Meeting. This would make a purposeful programme for all, and the results of the Conference might then be considered definite and practical.

The growing interest in the mental health and well‐being of populations raises questions about traditional measures of public mental health, which have largely focused on levels of psychiatric morbidity. This paper describes work in progress to identify a set of national mental health and well‐being indicators for Scotland that could be used to establish a summary mental health profile, as a starting point for monitoring future trends. The process in taking this work forward involves identifying a desirable set of indicators, scoping the data that are currently collected nationally in Scotland, identifying additional data needs, and ensuring existing data collection systems include mental health and well‐being. It is expected that an indicator set for adults will have been identified by 2007. The paper presents some of the conceptual and practical challenges involved in defining and measuring positive mental health and is presented here as a contribution to ongoing debates in this field.

Aslib is most fortunate this year to have secured the services as President of Sir Lindor Brown, Waynflete Professor of Physiology in the University of Oxford and Biological Secretary of the Royal Society. It will be remembered that Sir Lindor gave the opening address at the International Conference on Scientific Information held in Washington in November 1958, and that he has been Chairman of the Consultative Committee for the National Lending Library for Science and Technology since its formation.

The racial diversity of the Caribbean stemmed directly from the historical processes of colonialism, imperialism, slavery, and indentureship. Since the early 17th century, slaves have been imported from Africa to work in the Caribbean. In the British West Indies, slavery was abolished in 1834 but these African slaves worked on the sugar estates until the apprenticeship was abolished on August 1, 1838. Even before 1838, planters frequently complained of labor shortages and appealed to Britain for the approval of imported labor. Thus, there were attempts by the planters in colonies, such as Trinidad, to introduce Chinese labor to the plantations. As early as 1806, there was the importation of 192 Chinese from Macao and Penang into Trinidad. However, this experiment soon failed. In 1834 and 1839, laborers from Portugal were imported into Trinidad. This soon ended as Portuguese workers could not withstand the rigorous conditions of the contract labor system.

Without proper treatment, waste cooking oil (WCO) will bring serious environmental and health hazards, which can be effectively alleviated by converting it into biofuel. Subsidies from the government usually play a significant role in encouraging recycling activities and supporting sustainable supply chain. This paper aims to quantitatively investigate the incentive effects of government subsidies under asymmetric information.

This paper applies the principal–agent contract to compare the incentive effects of the two widely used subsidy modes (raw material price subsidy [MS] and finished product sale subsidy [FS]) in a management system which consists of the government and a bio-firm where the bio-firm’s conversion rate of the WCO remains as private information.

Results indicate that the two subsidy modes have the same performance under symmetric information, while under asymmetric information, the government always prefers the MS mode which is more environment-friendly. Besides, if the average conversion rate is large or the uncertainty level of the asymmetric information is moderate, the MS mode is Pareto-improving compared with the FS mode for the government and the high-type bio-firm. Only when the average conversion rate is small or the uncertainty level is very small/very large, the high-type bio-firm welcomes the FS mode.

Different from the existing literature, this paper applies the principal–agent contract into the WCO management system and quantitatively compares the two subsidy modes taking the practical problem of asymmetric information into consideration.

The Library of the University of Leeds, at the invitation of the Nuffield Foundation, carried out a survey of the borrowing use made of it by the staff, research students, and undergraduates of the university during the calendar year 1957, and a report on this survey was published in the Journal of Documentation in March 1959. The results were of value in showing in great detail what demands were made upon the library's stock by different groups of borrowers; it did not show how much use was made of the library for reading on the premises, or how much users of the University Library were able to draw upon external or private resources. The statistics for borrowing showed that undergraduate students ranged fairly widely in their borrowing, and that, for example, many of them made good use of the periodicals in their fields of studies, but it also showed that many of them borrowed from the university libraries only once or twice in a year, or not at all. What other resources had these students? How much did they read and work in the library without borrowing, and how much did they depend upon outside libraries, upon private borrowing, and upon their own book buying? Evidently a more comprehensive account of students' use of the library was needed to show the relative importance of the various means at the student's disposal in his need for books.

This paper aims to address the association between the quality and quantity of information in supply chains and the costs and benefits of generating, using and sharing it.

The authors’ conceptual framework draws on multiple disciplines and theories of the value and use of product information. Controllable aspects of information, its quality and quantity, are the focus of the study as drivers of firm and chain performance. Structural equation models of constructs at two stages of the Australian red meat supply chain are employed, using data from a survey of 81 sheep and cattle breeders and commercial producers.

Information quality influences performance more for some product attributes than others and is more influential than is information quantity. Information sharing for many attributes generates benefits only at high cost. Investment in measurement and transmission technologies is supported for intrinsic and extrinsic measures of quality. Differences in respondents' evaluation of information quality are interpreted as evidence of persistent chain failure.

To the authors' knowledge, this is the first attempt at quantifying and comparing the benefits and costs of information sharing across multiple stages of a supply chain and the first to assess quantitatively the role played by information quality and quantity in generating costs and benefits.