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Explains the importance of the risk management function as part of the disaster recovery‐planning process. Explains what you can and cannot insure and the importance of not underestimating the “indemnity period”. Explains methods of establishing the “sum insured”, along with the establishment of premiums, the payment of claims, and the importance of post‐disaster insurance reviews.

The organization of information technology components into effective enterprise information systems is fast becoming a basic infra‐structural and operational necessity for every organization and business sector. These information systems must be well managed, cost‐efficient, legal, and safe. There is a growing reliance upon IT in many organizations to the point of mission‐criticality. Ideas from disaster recovery planning (DRP) can and should be applied to installed information systems and the new information services whose continuous and reliable functioning may be vital to the organization. This paper reviews the literature concerning the factors that have been identified as essential to the development of DRPs in organizations. As a result of a survey study of four business sectors in Hong Kong: banking, manufacturing, trading, and hotels – the top five critical factors for a successful DRP in information systems are identified with the preferred patterns of DRP identical for three of these sectors.

Reports on the results of a major flood at the University of Sussex Library’s repository at Lewes in October 2000, which severely damaged a collection of 42,000 books, 14,000 bound periodical volumes, microfilms, newspapers, report literature and other materials. It describes the way in which the detailed insurance claim was drawn up and the methodology used to quantify the losses, using a combination of machine‐readable data, card catalogues and estimation. It also describes the methodology used to calculate the cost of restoration and the value for replacement purposes. The outcome of the claim and future plans for collection development at Sussex are summarised. The conclusion draws some general lessons for future disaster prevention on how to minimise risks from flooding and gives advice on insuring library collections as well as drawing up insurance claims after disasters.

THE new President of the Library Association, a handsome portrait of whom appears in the December Library Association Record, brings to the office the influences of a career of fine public service. We, in common with every journal that speaks to and for librarians, assure him of loyalty and congratulate ourselves on this addition to the roll of distinguished men who have served librarianship. The Record is wise in reminding us that we are more than a librarians' association and the regular election of men of affairs as presidents is a policy that used to be followed and should now be continued. The policy need not exclude in normal circumstances an alternate librarian president.

The paper reports an empirical study designed to establish the extent to which adequate concrete cover to reinforcement in a sample of structures was achieved. It was found that the standards fell significantly short of those specified. Two kinds of explanation are considered to account for these findings. The first accepts as given the existing divisions of responsibility and conventions for specifying quality and looks to identify the reasons for non‐compliance. The second proposes that the present arrangements and conventions are inappropriate to the conditions of variability and uncertainty standardly met with in construction. On the basis of this second set of assumptions, an alternative approach, using the concept of continuous quality improvement, is described and discussed.

OUR custom of giving a report on the Library Association conference may be observed in a reduced manner this year, because we have already dealt, by anticipation, with many of its subjects and the actual meetings did not produce any Startling variation from the expected. So far as the general conduct of affairs was concerned, no conference has been handled better in what is now a long, successful sequence. The local secretariat functioned so efficiently that it was almost unobserved and unheard as first‐class machinery always is. The President's work, both in his address and handling of meetings, was masterly. The papers were a good average; some were too long, one occupying a whole hour; some were intended to be revolutionary and went off in verbal crackers; a few showed the curious modern faith that what a man does not do himself is “an outmoded technique”—a faith he could not hold if his experience were sufficient. But, on the whole, in all its variations, it was a worth‐while meeting and there was something good in every paper. We must insist, however, that the Council should vet the papers and the speakers' ability to read them adequately. To ask him to address a meeting of fourteen hundred people, the majority of them expert in the subject of the address, is a very high compliment for the Association to pay to a librarian, or, indeed, anyone else, and elementary text‐book material is unsuitable for so august an occasion. No doubt Scarborough provided the Council with some lessons in this direction.

KEN JONES of the Leeds school of librarianship, fresh from his triumphant appearance in Private eye's ‘Pseuds corner’ in December, has been bearding the la secretariat about association response to the Cinematograph & Indecent Displays Bill, insofar as its provisions may affect libraries. Readers will be aware that this proposed enactment is another of the ‘If you must do it, do it privately’ type, like the Street Offences Act in the 1950s which got London's tarts out of the alleys and up into the attics.

THE London & Home Counties Branch of the la reports a gratifying response to its attempts last year to attract a wider list of applications for its biennial Senior Librarians Award, worth £800. As a result, a proportion of the 1973 award has been allotted to Ivan G Sparkes, Librarian of High Wycombe, Bucks, for research into source material relating to furniture history, and to Celia F Thimann, a lecturer at Ealing (London) school of librarianship for a visit to Japan in the autumn to study library provision and information systems in the field of ecological conservation and pollution.

Just as the films that we see are conceived in specific economic, political and cultural contexts, so scholarship is produced within determined situations. This chapter notes some of the driving forces which have led to the emergence of law and film as an area of extensive and very diverse scholarship in the past decade. Whilst these factors have shaped the nature and extent of this work it should be noted that changes in both legal professional interests, academic criteria and within the culture industry mean that we can expect shifts in the nature and patterns of scholarship in the future. These may not, however, be the ones called for by other commentators (Moran, Sandon, Loizidou, & Christie, 2004; Sarat, Douglas, & Umphrey, 2005).