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Describes the background to publishing in Scotland and outlines the nature and range of current Scottish publishing houses. Sets Scottish publishing within its UK and European context and indicates a number of major trends. Presents broad statistics of current Scottish publishing. Describes the nature, activities and achievements of 30 Scottish publishing houses, from large to small and from general to specialist.

It is proposed that public libraries have a duty to collect material from alternative publishers (in both fiction and non‐fiction and in all media) to better reflect the diversity of their communities. This paper aims to investigate the links between alternative publishing and public libraries in Scotland.

Two surveys (based on the 1979 Alternative Acquisitions Project) were carried out of alternative publishers and public libraries in Scotland. Questions were based on those in the 1979 survey, except where updated to accommodate new technologies. A literature review was also carried out to contextualise survey findings.

While alternative publishers and public libraries were aware of each other, alternative publishers faced many hurdles in getting their material in public libraries. For their part, public libraries were constrained by budgets but wanted to extend support for alternative publishing.

This paper re‐uses a previously tried and tested methodology to create a comparable and up to date study of an area of publishing often overlooked. Alternative publishing is revealed as a flourishing area, despite trends towards fewer and larger publishing outlets. Public libraries are seen as having a vital role to play in giving an outlet to alternative publishing.

The SCRAN multimedia resource base has been built with capital funding from the National Lottery, but its future relies on securing a revenue stream to support its services. This article describes how SCRAN has gone about building an e‐commerce service.

The London Borough of the Isle of Dogs provides the venue for the 14th Anglo Welsh Book Fair in its nouveau‐brutaliste Barbarian Centre. Soft music and a male stripper on the Farago stand confirms that this event has now arrived on the international bookworm calendar.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically test how company size affects the use of Scotland’s place brand in product branding by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the book industry in Scotland.

This paper uses a mixed-method approach to investigate place brand adoption for product branding by SMEs in the Scottish book industry through the analysis of Scotland’s place brand identifiers in a corpus of 208 online book blurbs.

Results from the analysis show that, amongst SMEs in the Scottish publishing industry, smaller companies are more likely to use Scotland place brand identifiers in product marketing.

This is the first study to analyze book blurbs from a marketing perspective and it is one of the few articles on product-place co-branding. Additionally, branding in SMEs is a relatively new and uncharted area of research to which this study contributes, and branding in book publishing is also a scarcely researched area, to which this study offers new, empirical data about the relationship between place brands and product brands.

The Glasgow Digital Library (GDL) Project has a significance over and above its primary aim of creating a joint digital library for the citizens of Glasgow. It is also both an important building block in the development of a planned and co‐ordinated “virtual Scotland” and a rich environment for research into issues relevant to that enterprise. Its creation comes at a time of political, social, economic and cultural change in Scotland, and may be seen, at least in part, as a response to a developing Scottish focus in these areas, a key element of which is a new socially inclusive and digitally driven educational vision and strategy based on the Scottish traditions of meritocratic education, sharing and common enterprise, and a fiercely independent approach. The initiative is based at the Centre for Digital Library Research at Strathclyde University alongside a range of other projects of relevance both to the development of a coherent virtual landscape in Scotland and to the GDL itself, a supportive environment which allows it to draw upon the research results and staff expertise of other relevant projects for use in its own development and enables its relationship to virtual Scotland to be both explored and developed more readily. Although its primary aim is the creation of content (based initially on electronic resources created by the institutions, on public domain information, and on joint purchases and digitisation initiatives) the project will also investigate relationships between regional and national collaborative collection management programmes with SCONE (Scottish Collections Network Extension project) and relationships between regional and national distributed union catalogues with CAIRNS (Co‐operative Academic Information Retrieval Network for Scotland) and COSMIC (Confederation of Scottish Mini‐Clumps). It will also have to tackle issues associated with the management of co‐operation.

AN older librarian, we think, looking at the Annual Report of the Library Association, which is the principal publication of June, must almost rub his eyes in bewilderment at the recent progress made. In the outer world of libraries, that part which the public sees, there are symptoms, and actual signs, of development; new branch libraries, such as those at Sheffield, at Croydon, and at Dartford, are portents of a sort—pleasant substitutes, and most effective ones, for the larger, orthodox (in size at least) branches such as Yardley Wood, Crossgates, Firth Park and Leith. Greater development must be a problem for a few years to come, as every librarian must acknowledge. It is in the development of librarianship and bibliology that this record of the L.A. is so significant. The bare fact that the Centenary Year sees the L.A. with a membership rapidly approaching ten thousand and an income of £36,000 seems almost incredible. Even more so is the fact, not quite so pleasing, that by £347 this income proved insufficient; but, on reflection, that, too, is a sign of activity. The Association has almost ceased what was once thought to be its main pre‐occupation; its own organization, or, as one of our writers called it, “the moving about of its domestic furniture.” It is now deeply concerned with international librarianship, an attitude which in no small measure it owes to Mr. H. M. Cashmore and to Mr. Welsford's flair as host at Chaucer House; its gradual adjustment of its benefits, including the education ones, so that they appeal to other than public librarians, as they formerly did, and to such an extent that over one thousand special and university librarians are grouped in it; the immense, for it is that, educational and examination scheme, which from the accounts appears to cost: the administration about £1,900 more than the candidates' fees provide; its extending publishing business, now costing in all £12,150 a year, but bringing in returns more valuable than the substantial sales would suggest, and the quite remarkable library, information, and research work. The Association has become a large business, influencing the life of every librarian and energizing most of the work now done in libraries. The Report has a general acknowledgment paragraph recording the debt owed to the chairmen of committees. It is a modest tribute to a group of men who give great labours to our interests. To be the chairman of a Library Association Committee today is to be a leader and hard‐driven worker. We owe them much. And this does not reduce our admiration for the manner in which the official staff of the Association do their work.