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At almost 1,500 feet above sea level Wanlockhead is the highest village in Scotland, lying in the Lowther Hills some eight miles above Sanquhar in Nithsdale and a similar distance from Abington in Lanarkshire, above the Clyde Valley. The name of its close neighbour, Leadhills, gives the clue to why inhabitants could have been induced to settle in such a remote, bleak and inhospitable location, for lead had been mined in the area since the Middle Ages. It was during the Seventeenth Century that mining in the area became a significant activity and in the Eighteenth Century the numbers of miners and their employees increased dramatically and social and village life developed.

A large gathering of the Press saw No. 3 in Shell's ‘Industrial Notebook’ series of films, A History of the Oil Engine last month and acclaimed it as one of the most interesting films ever produced for anyone with some slight knowledge of or interest in oil engines. This is a documentary film of importance to recorded history because many of the ‘shots’ have never been seen by the general public before, having lain in archives and museums only. The history is traced from an original sketch of Christian Huygen's gun‐powder engine in the 17th century, through 1861 when Otto first conceived the idea of building a new kind of engine, and James Robson, Ackroyd Stuart, Rudolf Diesel, James McKechnie and others right book ‘An outline history of the oil engine and its lubrication’, and whether one sees the film or not, the book is a ‘must’ for every student of engineering, and for everyone with any interest in oil engines. Many of the stills from the film are reproduced here, the older ones without retouching, and there are reproductions of drawings from old patent specifications of two and four‐stroke gas engines of the 1870/1880 period. In fact wo found that after the film had whetted our appetites and shown us how little we really knew about the early history of the oil engine, this book has enabled us to follow up with confirmation of facts, figures and dates.

Describes the development and use of the Book Trade Electronic Data Interchange Standard (BEDIS) at Paisley College Library in collaboration with the booksellers, John Smith & Sons (Glasgow). BEDIS is an automated book supply system which has advantages over systems presently used by many large libraries which rely on downloaded systems and which therefore have the disadvantage of locking a library into one supplier. Describes the development and installation of the BEDIS system from the viewpoint of the librarian, the bookseller and the computer analyst. Stuart James gives an overview and considers favourably the system′s future application in other libraries.