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The British Library was established in 1973 from organisations with much longer histories. One of these was the Library of the British Museum which was founded in 1753. Since then the collections of the British Library have developed, until today it is one of the major libraries in the world. It is best known for its collections of books and periodicals and there are over 600 kilometres of shelving to hold these. Possibly less well known are the collections of nearly 1.5 million music scores, two million maps, three million microforms, 32 million patent specifications and about 40 million stamps.

The new British Library building is being constructed next to St. Pancras railway station in London. The building itself is being constructed for the Department of National Heritage by PSA Projects, their Management Contractors, Laing Management, and a large number of sub‐contractors. By contrast the automation supporting the services in the new building is being managed directly by the British Library. This paper gives an outline of these computer systems and the services that they provide. It concentrates more on what the systems do rather than the technology by which they achieve their results. The main computer systems supporting reader services are readers' admissions, the online catalogue and automatic book request.

Humans have had to communicate with computers since the latter were invented but now it is also becoming important for the computers to be able to talk to each other. One way of providing these computer to computer links is to follow the developing Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) standards. Several organizations in North America have been developing initial links between their systems using these standards. This development has the general title of the Linked Systems Project (LSP).

Safety precautions in the use of raw materials, in manufacturing and processing, marketing and enforcement of food and drug law on purity and quality may appear nowadays to be largely a matter of routine, with manufacturers as much involved and interested in maintaining a more or less settled equilibrium as the enforcement agencies. Occasionally the peace is shattered, eg, a search and recovery operation of canned goods of doubtful bacterial purity or containing excess metal contamination, seen very much as an isolated incident; or the recent very large enforcement enterprise in the marketing of horseflesh (and other substitutions) for beef. The nationwide sale and distribution of meat on such a vast scale, only possible by reason of marketing methods — frozen blocks of boneless meat, which even after thawing out is not easily distinguishable from the genuine even in the eye of the expert; this is in effect only a fraud always around in the long ago years built up into a massive illicit trade.

The brief announcement that the Government had accepted that there should be regulations on open date marking of food, to come into effect in 1975, will come as no surprise. It is a timely reminder of what public pressure can achieve these days; how sustained advocacy and publicity by interested sectors of society—magistrates, local authorities, public health workers, consumer groups—can secure legislative changes which, in this case, run counter to trade opinions and the recommendation originally made by the Food Standards Committee that such a proposal was not practical and the existing law was an adequate protection. This was stated in the FSC Report on Food Labelling of 1964, although there was no indication of the evidence reviewed or that the subject had been considered very deeply; it was, after all, only a small fraction of the problem of food labelling control. It was also stated in this Report that in certain cases, date‐stamping of food could give to purchasers a false sense of security, “not justified by the conditions under which the food has been kept since manufacture”.

VINE is a Very Informal Newsletter produced three times a year by the Information Officer for library Automation and financed by the British library Research & Development Department. It is issued free of charge on request to interested librarians, systems staff and library college lecturers. VINE'S objective is to provide an up‐to‐date picture of work being done in O.K. library automation which has not been reported elsewhere.

The 18th ELAG (European Library Automation Group) meeting ‘Library services in an electronic environment’ was held in Budapest from 27 to 29 April 1994. ELAG was the guest of the prestigious Hungarian National Széchényi Library. One hundred and thirty European library automation specialists attended the seminar, among them about a quarter from Eastern Europe. The success was guaranteed by the programme, the continued enthusiasm of all members, and the smooth integration of the newcomers. Now, in its 15th year of existence, ELAG (European Library Automation Group) became European in the real sense of the word. Indeed nearly all European countries were represented. The ELAG members noted this achievement as a very important milestone.

Resource sharing is an important element in the national planning of library and information services to meet the needs of information, education and culture of the whole community at all levels. An overview of resource sharing practices is presented, with particular reference to the British scene. It is also argued that, with the approach of the Single Market in 1992, resource sharing should now be considered on a European scale. In conclusion, some problems associated with the practice of resource sharing are considered.

Since the beginning of this year the libraries have been preparing machine readable records for their current intake. This is, until the first computer‐output catalogue is produced, in parallel with production of catalogue cards in the normal way. The two‐tier record structure being used by BLCMP requires that a general MARC record be held for each book. In addition to this each of the participating libraries holding a copy of the book makes a local record to hold data such as accession number and location. These records are being punched and verified and input to the IBM 360 computer which creates MARC records, carries out error checking and produces a diagnostic print. This print is being checked by the cataloguing staffs who are noting particularly what type of errors occur and for what reason, e.g. illegible handwriting or bad punching. Corrections to the record are not being made at present since the union catalogue create and amendment programs are as yet not available.

VINE is a Very Informal Newsletter produced three times a year by the Information Officer for library Automation and financed by the British Library Research & Development Department. It is issued free of charge on request to interested librarians, systems staff and library college lecturers. VINE'S objective is to provide an up‐to‐date picture of work being done in U.K. library automation which has not been reported elsewhere.