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Demographers, researchers and US Census data users can join the ranks of the do‐it‐yourselfers and create customised demographic tabulations and research data, using three new Census Bureau CDROM products now available from the Census Bureau: Public User Microdata Samples (PUMS), Census Transportation Planning Package (CTPP) and School District Data Book(SDDB). As a lead state agency for coordinating and distributing Census data, the Indiana State Data Center makes these products available to a variety of users including planners, legislators, state and local agencies, university research departments and area businesses.

As shown in their earlier stories, while at differing times and places Janice and Mary searched for a research methodology that felt congruent with who they were each becoming and the inquiries they imagined, they both became drawn toward the relational aspects of narrative inquiry. As Clandinin and Connelly wrote: “Relationship is key to what it is that narrative inquirers do” (2000, p. 189). Key in negotiating relationships as narrative inquirers is our collective sharing of stories of experience. This relational storytelling shapes both shared vulnerability among storytellers as each person awakens to the complexity of lives being composed and recomposed and, too, a growing sense of working from, and with, stories as a way to shape personal, social, and institutional change (Clandinin & Connelly, 1998, 2000; Connelly & Clandinin, 2006). Clandinin and Connelly (1998) describe this kind of narrative change as taking shape in the following ways:For us, the promise of storytelling emerges when we move beyond regarding a story as a fixed entity and engage in conversations with our stories. The mere telling of a story leaves it as a fixed entity. It is in the inquiry, in our conversations with each other, with texts, with situations, and with other stories that we can come to retelling our stories and to reliving them. (p. 251)Furthermore, Maenette Benham (2007) writes thatthe power of narrative is that, because it deeply explores the tensions of power by illuminating its collisions (e.g., differences of knowledge and practices), it reveals interesting questions that mobilize processes and resources that benefit native people and their communities. Indeed, the political impact of narrative cannot be dismissed. (pp. 513–514)

FOR public libraries the Ministerial statement that proposals for the future of local government will be laid before Parliament before October may prove to be most significant. We say may, because such preliminaries usually raise undue expectations. Meanwhile during the summer speculation may range over the public library possibilities of the situation. Will the known blue‐prints made for us come into the picture: the masterly, and at that time far too advanced, pattern in the McColvin Report, already fourteen years old, and the older Ministry of Reconstruction Report, made as the First World War was closing, which would have given libraries, willy‐nilly, to the Education Committee? Will the present L.A. plan, which everyone knows, affect matters? Will public libraries come in at all? Local Government, as at present organized, does work, even if the machinery creaks with too many uncontrolled bodies intervening in every part, too much remote control, and, conversely, too little co‐operative organization, too many jealousies, boundary graspings, disputes and much expensive, unnecessary litigation. That public librarians can provide an acceptable solution for their own admittedly limited field will, alas, not occur to many authority minds. In the reconstruction of the patchwork now existing our library leaders must be alert to prevent complete indifference to library needs and possibilities. We feel sure they will be. That vigilance will be necessary even if, as we suspect from the tendency of the times, what will be proposed is not likely to produce radical redistributions and changes. The counties, municipal corporations, and the urban districts together form a formidable combination and, we think, can prevent further encroachments on their areas and increased restrictions of their powers. The way may be somewhat plainer before the L.A. Annual General Meeting is held in September, but the announcement we are discussing came later than the printing of the outline programme of the Conference which is inserted in the May L.A. Record.

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.

This introduction seeks to locate the origins of the competency management in American and British management concerns with declining international competitiveness and the need for more efficient and effective managers. It examines the distinctive American and British approaches and identifies and defines the ideas, concepts and techniques associated with competency in each country. The transfer of these ideas and practices into the public sector accompanied the spread of new public management, which has increased throughout the 1990s. The movement is now an international one prompted by both the OECD and the management consultancy industry. The process of adoption and implementation has tended to be pragmatic and ad hoc but evidence suggests it is now becoming an important vehicle for organisational cultural change. This introduction provides the backdrop for the remaining five articles in this special issue of the journal, which illustrate both developments in theory and practice of competency‐based management within public services.

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.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.