Search results

Organisations have become looser as expectations of working life, markets and organisations themselves have changed. In order to restore the “glue” necessary for success, teambuilding must be implemented. The means of achieving this are discussed, involving a positive approach to the Five Rs, Reason, Results, Roles, Routine and Review, absence of which will lead to underperforming and lack of co‐ordination.

Today information products are available on various electronic media. Choices include traditional online hosts, databases on CD‐ROM or locally mounted, and the Internet with its numerous information resources. The paper describes the pricing structure of the different electronic options together with the technical and personnel requirements to run an information service. Also the characteristics of such information systems concerning user, training and availability of the service are dealt with. The discussion of pros and cons enable an information manager to make cost‐effective decisions.

IN 1946 there was in the British Isles a clear image of librarianship in most librarians' minds. The image depended on a librarian's professional environment which was of the widest possible range, not less in variation than the organisations, institutes or types of community which required library services. Generalisations are like cocoanuts but they provide for the quickest precipitation of variant definitions, after the stones have been thrown at them. A generalisation might claim that, in 1946, public librarians had in mind an image of a librarian as organiser plus technical specialist or literary critic or book selector; that university and institute librarians projected themselves as scholars of any subject with a special environmental responsibility; that librarians in industry regarded themselves as something less than but as supplementing the capacity of a subject specialist (normally a scientist). Other minor separable categories existed with as many shades of meaning between the three generalised definitions, while librarians of national libraries were too few to be subject to easy generalisation.