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When was the last time you faced an uncomfortable interview, when your mind went blank after a crucial question was asked or you uttered a clumsy sentence that you didn't mean to? The chances are that this has happened to you at some time or other, whether it be at a job interview, an appraisal interview, or with a work colleague when a problem is a disciplinary one, or where an area of conflict needs to be resolved.

J.D.C. Hemsley, a Director of OMI International Corporation's manufacturing and marketing business in the UK, has been elected President of The Institute of Metal Finishing for a two‐year term commencing July 1984.

The mammoth proportions of Public Expenditure, its accountability, its control, must be one of the biggest problems any government has had to meet. Despite all its counselling to the public spenders, its massive efforts to scale down the spending, there is extremely little to show for it. The Departments and State Services have become so large, they have outgrown government control; they are in fact forms of government in themselves. When a body established with a definite role becomes so big and powerful, as many of the authorities in the country have become, they tend to resent any form of control over them. History has many such examples in one form or another. Where an ocean divides them, the subordinate power may seek a separate nationhood for itself, as the American colonies did a couple of centuries or more ago. They chose the right moment to rebel when the home government sought to pass on extra levy on the importation of tea, which the Colonists turned into a slogan “no taxation without representation”. The truth, however, was they had outgrown the mother country and saw themselves as a new nation in a new land immensely rich in natural resources, riches all theirs for the taking. Much of the old country understood their aspirations and in the final settlement, the British were more than generous to them.

OF old the public library was wont to take its reputation from the character of the newsroom. That room, as everyone knows, attracts every element in the community and it may be it attracts especially the poorer elements;—even at times undesirable ones. These people in some towns, but perhaps not so often now‐a‐days, have been unwashen and often not very attractive in appearance. It was natural, things being as they are, that the room should give a certain tone to the institution, and indeed on occasion cause it to be avoided by those who thought themselves to be superior. The whole level of living has altered, and we think has been raised, since the War. There is poverty and depression in parts of the country, it is true; but there are relief measures now which did not exist before the War. Only those who remember the grinding poverty of the unemployed in the days, especially the winter days, before the War can realise what poverty really means at its worst. This democratic levelling up applies, of course, to the public library as much as to any institution. At present it may be said that the part of the library which is most apparent to the public and by which it is usually judged, is the lending or home‐reading department. It therefore needs no apology if from time to time we give special attention to this department. Even in the great cities, which have always concentrated their chief attention upon their reference library, to‐day there is an attempt to supply a lending library service of adequate character. We recall, for example, that the Leeds Public Library of old was first and foremost a reference library, with a lending library attached; to‐day the lending library is one of the busiest in the kingdom. A similar judgment can be passed upon Sheffield, where quite deliberately the city librarian would restrict the reference library to works that are of real reference character, and would develop more fully the lending library. In Manchester, too, the new “Reference Library”—properly the new Central Library—has a lending library which issues about 1,500 volumes daily. There must be all over the country many libraries issuing up to a thousand volumes each a day from their central lending departments. This being the case the department comes in for very careful scrutiny.

The subject of the meeting on 20 June was ‘Numerically Controlled Routing’. Dave Dosier, of Paul Dosier Associates, explained how important it is to maximise programming and routing equipment. Former dusty, noisy fabrication rooms are now humming with NC equipment.

This paper describes the use of a modified cassette recorder to present information and instruction to intermediaries and users of on‐line information retrieval systems using three media. The cassette recorder co‐ordinates (1) computer signals recorded from and displayed upon a visual display unit, (2) audio‐signals, that is voice commentary, relayed through a loud speaker, and (3) thirty‐five millimetre slides displayed on an overhead screen. The system was designed and developed for use in the Central Information Services, London University.

OUR fifty‐ninth volume is opened by this issue of the Library World, which has survived longer than any other independent library periodical. Some reflections, which may indeed seem repetitive, seem to be natural in the circumstances. We have a sense of gratitude to the number of readers, who as writers and subscribers have sustained us so long and will we trust continue to do so. From the first we have adhered closely to the thesis that our business was with the conduct of libraries and the activities, even personal ones, of librarians but not with their private affairs. We have endeavoured to initiate and to describe methods many of which are now commonplace in their acceptance. Thus J. D. Brown our founder and first Editor published in this his series on charging systems; Louis Stanley Jast his serial on his own cataloguing methods; Dr. E. A. Baker made known his views on the annotation of books; J. D. Stewart and Berwick Sayers wrote for those pages their study, afterwards published as the book The Card Catalogue—these are a few examples. The lighter forms of librarianship writing may be said to have been initiated in this country in our pages, for example the reports of the Pseudonyms' meetings which, it must be confessed, have a vague relation only to what actually took place at them; and the over‐thirty years' serial, Letters on Our Affairs, initiated in 1913 by one who became a world famous librarian, established, especially in its first decade, this style of critical writing which has had so many imitators.

WE wish our readers success and prosperity for 1935. In the pages of our last number was given a brief retrospect of the events of 1934, and there is no advantage in repeating any part of it. Suffice to say, the year was one of the most memorable in the annals of libraries from the point of view of the new buildings which have been erected to serve great places. The year before us will present a full programme of work for all librarians. The major interest will probably be the conference to be held at Manchester in September, when hundreds of librarians will have the opportunity of seeing the building of the largest of British, if not of European, public libraries. We understand, too, that the conference will deal systematically with the efficient library in the modern community, but no doubt fuller information upon this programme will be forthcoming very shortly. The time is not ripe, we fear, for us to expect anything in the shape of a consolidating library aft which shall bring into coherency the scattered library laws of this country. We hope something will be done in the year to improve the examination system of the Library Association, which fails to give satisfaction as it stands at present. We confidently expect that the co‐operation embodied in the Regional Library Bureau will be extended, and as our recent pages have shown, we hope that the National Central Library will be relieved of some of its financial anxieties by direct action upon the part of public libraries and of the Treasury. There are signs that the country is gradually returning to prosperity, and we hope that in any such event libraries will benefit and librarians will receive some attention in the matter of their salaries.