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My own interest in VR stems from the fact that, in 1984, I was bought a Sinclair Spectrum as an “unbirthday” present. Since then I have been hooked on computers, and my partner, often now a computer widower, has had cause to rue the day of that impulse buy. My interest has, in the last year or so, been captured by the notion, and more recently implementation, of “virtual reality”(VR).

Last month there was an unexpected complete absence of anything I felt like shouting about. This month there's more than enough.

Details a Library Association one‐day workshop aimed to raise among librarians and to encourage senior managers of and information services to devise appropriate strategies coping with the process of demographic change on the Library Service (LIS) workforce. Covers issues for the LIS including gender, graduates and returners to work and on solutions proposed. Concludes that it will become that library schools reduce their drop‐out rates after if employers are to fill the posts which become available.

Regrets that the women in libraries group recently elected to affiliate to the Library Association. Notes that radical Librarianship, while finding its locus in the library, draws on a wider knowledge of issues around the production and consumption of knowledge, power relations and inequalities of access to knowledge. Concludes that the future of radical librarianship looks bleak and this must bode ill for the future of the profession as a whole.

1989 was designated Museums Year to commemorate the centenary of the Museums Association, and unlike many of these PR exercises this one resulted in museums (especially national museums based in London) receiving an unusual amount of coverage in the qualities. Whether stories of protests and problems would have the desired positive effect on actual attendances has not yet been calculated. The unusually sunny weather cannot have helped much either. But the Museums Association itself produced a series of 11 regional guides which if read on the beach or in the pool would have enabled the readers almost to think that they had actually visited the collections described in considerable detail. Too many to note here but a list of all the titles is available from the MA or the Museums and Galleries Commission. Simon Olding's Exploring Museums: London (ISBN 0 11 2904653) and Arnold Wilson's Exploring Museums: The South West (ISBN 0 11 2904696) tackle their areas entertainingly, but their step‐by‐step guides to some of their subjects may soon be outdated as many existing museums are currently undergoing major rearrangements or refurbishments.

I went to the Booksellers' Conference Exhibition (persona ELM Publications, Educational Books and Resources) hoping to alert booksellers to our new Factpacks series [Jackdaw look‐alikes, but with interesting differences].

Question: When is a Librarian not a Librarian?

One of the nine thought provoking essays assembled by Peter Vergo in the recently published The New Museology (Reaktan Books, ISBN 0 948 462 035 hardback, ISBN 0 948 462 043 paperback) is “The Quality of Visitors' Experiences in Art Museums” in which Philip Wright discusses the lack of awareness among museum personnel of what exactly their institutions are doing, and indeed should do, in a period when “films, television, video and pop access photography have inevitably altered, if not actually undermined the hierarchy of images that museums aim to display”. Few curators have had professional surveys of their audience undertaken, some have dismissed colleagues' changes as pandering to commercialisation, and invest in sophisticated technology and displays in such a way as to distract from the integrity of the objects in their care.

Considered going to IFLA 89 in Paris, but as noted in leading article in August, the fee of 2,200 francs would pay for a first class run around the Hexagon with SNCF for nine days with all sorts of extras and still leave enough for five good dinners. Expostulating thus to NLW's Favourite Overseas Librarian, Frances Salinié of the British Council in Paris, led her to make enquiry. Transpired, as they say, that belatedly and all unannounced one‐day registration at 300 francs was allowed. This possibility, the fact that I hadn't been to Paris this year, the near certainty that one day of IFLA would be an “elegant sufficiency” and a curiosity to see if “they order this matter… better in France” led me to the Gare du Nord clutching my 300 dirty oncers. Warning: lengthy chunk of political bias coming up. Don't bother to take reading matter on the London Dover/Folkestone railway. The swaying, clattering, noisome line makes reading, conversation or walkman listening virtually impossible. This chunk of Network Southeast is not a worthy descendant of the South‐Eastern and Chatham railway on which long dead father once drove beautiful locomotives. A pride in railways is one of the Victorian values not preached from the Downing Street pulpit. The new line promised for the Tunnel may sometime let you read in comfort, but that seems a rather drastic and expensive remedy.