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Describes the use of barcode labels as a part of library cataloguing using the PRISM service in York College Library. Examines the uses of barcodes, redefinition of a PASSPORT function key, and use of the redefined fuction key to simplify searching the OCLC database.

In recent years much criticism has been levelled against planning authorities for their apparent prejudice against large‐scale developments and their reluctance to take into account factors other than a narrow approach to land use. In this special feature Sheila Cassells argues that planning control should have regard to the welfare effects of retail competition, should consider the likely changes in respect of prices and the implications of these changes for low income families in urban and rural deprived areas, and should pay particular attention to the “uneven” effects of a hypermarket or superstore on the existing pattern of local trade. Most of the research for this article was done when the author was a postgraduate student in Town Planning at University College London.

We recall Sidney Greenstreet's profile of Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon: ‘Upon my soul sir, you are a character, you really are.’ The same might be said of Gorby, the leader of the second most powerful country in the world, whose stated philosophy over seventy years has been: profit is a moral evil.

During 1982–84, BLR&DD supported a study of medical information and its use by practitioners. The problem of low usage of information services was investigated by looking at the characteristics of information itself and the consequences of not knowing — the penalties for ignorance. Experts were invited to contribute papers on information and communication problems in specialist areas, such as addiction, drugs, alcoholism and exotic diseases. In June 1984, a conference was organised to enable a larger group to discuss the issues raised and consider implications for information transfer. A recently‐published volume now brings together the ten specialist contributions, an overview of the project and a report of the conference. Consensus and penalties for ignorance in the medical sciences, edited by J Michael Brittain (BL R&D Report 5842) is published by Taylor Graham, at £15 (isbn 0—947568 03 4).

An increasing number of studies claim on the decline of hospitality in the West. These works focus on the lack of tolerance or expressions against foreigners as the clear sign that something is changing. Of course, the COVID-19 pandemic mainly marked a type of intolerance with the foreign tourists. This book chapter brings reflection on the plot of HBO Saga Westworld to understand the ways forms of hospitality in a post-modern world.

The present book chapter is based on the technique of content analysis or film ethnography which dissects elements of films and movies. In so doing, film ethnography occupies a central position in the constellations of qualitative methods.

The present piece is a critique on what specialists dubbed as robot tourism. Westworld shows not only the cautions policymakers should have on robot tourism but also how the depersonalisation process works. Basically, Westworld speaks us of a dystopian amusing park where rich guests travel to torture and victimise humanoids (hosts) who are unable to retaliate. Westworld brings reflection on the decline or the end of hospitality, at least as we know it.

Just after 9/11 some critical voices alerted Western hospitality was in decline. This chapter goes on in the same direction. Westworld brings the problems of free choice, the liberty as well as hospitality into the foreground.

Application of the numerical method to the art of Medicine was regarded not as a “trivial ingenuity” but “an important stage in its development”; thus proclaimed Professor Bradford Hill, accepted as the father of medical statistics, a study still largely unintelligible to the mass of medical practitioners. The need for Statistics is the elucidation of the effects of multiple causes; this represents the essence of the statistical method and is most commendable. Conclusions reached empirically under statistical scrutiny have mistakes and fallacies exposed. Numerical methods of analysis, the mathematical approach, reveals data relating to factors in an investigation, which might be missed in empirical observation, and by means of a figure states their significance in the whole. A simplified example is the numerical analysis of food poisoning, which alone determines the commonest causative organisms, the commonest food vehicles and the organisms which affect different foods, as well as changes in the pattern, e.g., the rising incidence of S. agona and the increase of turkey (and the occasions on which it is served, such as Christmas parties), as a food poisoning vehicle. The information data enables preventive measures to be taken. The ever‐widening fields of Medicine literally teem with such situations, where complexities are unravelled and the true significance of the many factors are established. Almost every sphere of human activity can be similarly measured. Apart from errors of sampling, problems seem fewer and controversy less with technical methods of analysis then on the presentation and interpretation of figures, or as Bradford Hill states “on the application of common sense and on elementary rules of logic”.

I'VE said it before, and I'll say it again: Eastbourne is an excellent place for a conference, and I set out for it after five years' absence with the hope that its handsome and genial presence would produce something better than the mixture of ordinary, obvious and sometimes inaudible papers that have been a constituent of more than one intervening conference. That towns can affect such occasions is no doubt a farfetched conceit, but they certainly affect me; as soon as I arrived the environmental magic worked, and old friends and new faces were seen in the golden light of perfect autumn weather.

Small micros, big programs The increasing power of micros has meant that programs once thought the province of big science only are now edging toward the grasp of the humble one man bander. This could create a healthy egalitarianism in the library/information world where the large and small don't know one another. For too long real computer power has been for big libraries, either for automation projects of routines or for sophisticated information retrieval in large technical information units.