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Senior policy advisers face a number of basic practical issues that they must continuously negotiate if they are to successfully fulfil the policy advising function. Stemming from an Australian public sector experience, this paper offers an applied perspective on some of the more prominent of these issues: the question of political considerations in policy advising, the maintenance of good working relationships between policy advisers and ministers, the nature of timeliness, the extent of information needed before advice can be formulated, and the course to follow when policy advice is rejected. The paper seeks to arrive at some practical conclusions, not only for policy advisers already at the senior level, but also for those who are advancing their policy advising skills and find such issues material to their development.

AS FAIRLY WARNED to you earlier this year would transpire, what you are now reading is the 100th issue of NEW LIBRARY WORLD, a span of issues which has encompassed some 8½ years, several million words, a sizeable copse of trees to produce the paper on which those issues have been printed.

This survey covers civil, electrical and electronics, energy, environment, general, materials, mechanical, and traffic and transportation engineering. Areas such as biomedical and chemical engineering will be dealt with in future issues. Readers may find that the classifications included in this survey are not mutually exclusive but do occasionally overlap with one another. For instance, the section on environmental engineering includes a review of a book on the environmental impact of nuclear power plants, which might as easily have been part of the section on energy technology. Before we go into a discussion of data bases and indexes, I would like to note in this introductory section some recent bibliographic aids published during the period surveyed. Most engineering libraries will find them very valuable in their reference and acquisition functions. Since normal review sources will cover these books, I am merely listing them below: Malinowski, Harold Robert, Richard A. Gray and Dorothy A. Gray. Science and Engineering Literature. 2d ed., Littleton, Colorado, Libraries Unlimited, 1976. 368p. LC 76–17794 ISBN 0–87287–098–7. $13.30; Mildren, K. W., ed. Use of Engineering Literature. Woburn, Mass., Butterworths, 1976. 621p. ISBN 0–408–70714–3. $37.95. Mount, Ellis. Guide to Basic Information Sources in Engineering. New York, Wiley, Halsted Press, 1976. 196p. LC 75–43261 ISBN 0–47070–15013–0. $11.95 and Guide to European Sources of Technical Information. 4th ed., edited by Ann Pernet. Guernsey, Eng., F. Hodgson, 1976. 415p. ISBN 0–85280–161–0. $52.00.

Before documentation became his primary interest, Robert Fairthorne would conventionally have been described as an applied mathematician. Such a description, however, does not give a true indication of his special abilities. He is, in fact, dedicated to the task of bringing to science and engineering the benefits of mathematics in all its forms, and to him such classifications as ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ were mere irrelevancies.

The chemistry librarian has been better served by professional literature than any other subject specialist in the library, except perhaps the medical librarian. A new series of papers on chemical substance searching in Online Review continues this tradition. If the first installment of this series is an indication of what is to come, chemistry librarians and online searchers can look forward to a lot of valuable (and readable) literature on this most important topic. The useful column by Buntrock has, I am sure, already made valuable contributions to more efficient and effective online searching in chemistry.

The purpose of this research is to provide an introduction into Hoshin Kanri and how it has been used with other methodologies and frameworks. Additionally, factors that impact successful Hoshin Kanri implementation and future research opportunities are explored.

A systematic literature review was conducted to determine the methodologies and frameworks that have previously been explored and identify factors that lead to successful Hoshin Kanri implementation as it relates in the Western world.

Even though Hoshin Kanri has been used to a limited extent for decades in the West, there is still relatively little published research on the topic. In the period reviewed most published research was performed in the UK or USA. In addition, most years had less than two publications (the exception being five in 2020).

This literature review was primarily focused on the manufacturing sector, publications from 1990–2021, and available in English.

Current practitioners may use the research in this review to improve their current Hoshin Kanri practices using the techniques mentioned as a means of continuous improvement or to build a new framework for their own needs.

This paper makes an important contribution to the study of Hoshin Kanri as it provides: (1) an updated literature review regarding the study and application of Hoshin Kanri, (2) a qualitative analysis of alternative methodologies and frameworks to traditional Hoshin Kanri and (3) success factors when considering implementation of Hoshin Kanri within an organization and researchers with potential ideas for future research.

Searching for appropriate images as part of a work task is a non-trivial problem. Journalists and copywriters need to find images that are not only visually appropriate to accompany the documents they are creating, but are acceptably priced and licensed. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A work-based study methodology and grounded theory are used to collect qualitative data from a variety of creative professionals including journalists.

The authors report the findings of a study to investigate image search, retrieval and use by creative professionals who routinely use images as part of their work in an online environment. The authors describe the commercial constraints that have an impact on the image users’ behaviour that are not reported in other more academic and lab-based studies of image use (Westman, 2009).

The authors show that the commercial image retrieval systems are based on document retrieval systems, and that this is not the most appropriate approach in the journalism domain.

The authors describe the properties of an “information expedition”; the image seeking behaviour exhibited by journalists in an online environment, and contend that it is significantly different to existing image seeking models which represent other user types.

The papers by Robert A. Fairthorne are always both stimulating and challenging to me. Their insights and their obscurities are fascinating. While my own intellectual works have usually been quite separate from his, we have frequently shared a concern with many of the same topics in the principles of information work. These have included such topics as the mathematical basis of classification, applications of mathematical lattice theory, insights from Shannon's signalling theory (habitually misnamed ‘information theory’), and the delegation of retrieval.