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Federal attempts to stimulate technological innovation have been unsuccessful because of the application of an inappropriate policy framework that lacks conceptual and empirical knowledge of the process of technological innovation and fails to acknowledge the relationship between knowledge production, transfer, and use as equally important components of the process of knowledge diffusion. This article argues that the potential contributions of high‐speed computing and networking systems will be diminished unless empirically derived knowledge about the information‐seeking behavior of the members of the social system is incorporated into a new policy framework. Findings from the NASA/DoD Aerospace Knowledge Diffusion Research Project are presented in support of this assertion.

The process by which technological innovations developed in one institution are discovered, acquired, and adapted for use by another institution.

Engineering State is a week‐long program held at Utah State University each June. It is designed to introduce top high school students entering their senior year to the engineering field and the university experience, which includes learning to use a library. Initiated in 1990 by the civil engineering department, it expanded the following year to include additional departments within the College of Engineering. Although engineers are not typically strong library users, the civil engineering faculty felt a library component should be part of the students' Engineering State experience.

WE have to announce with deep regret the death of Mr. I. Chalkley Gould, founder and director of the Library World since its establishment in 1898. Mr. Gould was a member of an old Essex family associated with Loughton and its neighbourhood, and was born in 1844, his father being the late George Gould, of Traps Hill House, Loughton. His connection with the firm of Marlborough, Gould & Co. and other stationery and printing concerns led him many years ago to give some attention to library and museum work, towards which he had always been attracted because of his personal interest in archaeology and literature. In this way he became associated with many museums, libraries and antiquarian societies, and identified himself more particularly with the movement for the preservation of ancient British earthworks. He was a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, vice‐president of the Essex Archaeological Society, the Essex Field Club, and the British Archaeological Association. Within recent years he acted as hon. secretary of the Committee for Recording Ancient Earthworks and Fortified Enclosures—a committee for the formation of which he was largely responsible and in the work of which he took a very deep interest. He was chairman of the Committee for the Exploration of the Red Hills of Essex—an important undertaking which is not yet completed. He also contributed several valuable papers to the Victoria History of Essex, and assisted the editor of that publication in revising the earthworks sections of other counties.

This study investigates the complex interaction between properties of some emergent crises and the expertise of particular public sector leaders, who themselves are embedded in particular institutional processes that further constrain identification of these emergent crises. It is suggested that discrepancy in the ability of leaders to detect crises is due not only to their own proficiency in some cognitive skills, but also to their interaction with, and differences in, particular properties of some emergent crises, which render some emergent crises more detectable than others in some institutional environments.

EURILIA, which is part of the Commission of the European Communities (CEC) Libraries Programme, aims to enhance the libraries' research, development and education process which underpins the aerospace sector by establishing a new service based on a standardised pan‐European system for information access, retrieval, image browsing and document delivery. This will, in turn, extend the access and availability of major aerospace collections. The paper outlines work undertaken on the information needs of aerospace engineers and scientists. Also the development of the EURILIA system for OPAC searching and document delivery is described.

THE enterprise of two London newspapers, the Tribune (for the second time) and the Daily Chronicle, in organizing exhibitions of books affords a convenient excuse for once again bringing forward proposals for a more permanent exhibition. On many occasions during the past twenty years the writer has made suggestions for the establishment of a central book bazaar, to which every kind of book‐buyer could resort in order to see and handle the latest literature on every subject. An experiment on wrong lines was made by the Library Bureau about fifteen years ago, but here, as in the exhibitions above mentioned, the arrangement was radically bad. Visiting the Daily Chronicle show in company with other librarians, and taking careful note of the planning, one was struck by the inutility of having the books arranged by publishers and not by subjects. Not one visitor in a hundred cares twopence whether books on electricity, biography, history, travel, or even fairy tales, are issued by Longmans, Heinemann, Macmillan, Dent or any other firm. What everyone wants to see is all the recent and latest books on definite subjects collected together in one place. The arrangements at the Chronicle and Tribune shows are just a jumble of old and new books placed in show‐cases by publishers' names, similar to the abortive exhibition held years ago in Bloomsbury Street. What the book‐buyer wants is not a miscellaneous assemblage of books of all periods, from 1877 to date, arranged in an artistic show‐case and placed in charge of a polite youth who only knows his own books—and not too much about them—but a properly classified and arranged collection of the newest books only, which could be expounded by a few experts versed in literature and bibliography. What is the use of salesmen in an exhibition where books are not sold outright? If these exhibitions were strictly limited to the newest books only, there would be much less need for salesmen to be retained as amateur detectives. Another decided blemish on such an exhibition is the absence of a general catalogue. Imagine any exhibition on business lines in which visitors are expected to cart away a load of catalogues issued separately by the various exhibitors and all on entirely different plans of arrangement! The British publisher in nearly everything he does is one of the most hopeless Conservatives in existence. He will not try anything which has not been done by his grandfather or someone even more remote, so that publishing methods remain crystallized almost on eighteenth century lines. The proposal about to be made is perhaps far too revolutionary for the careful consideration of present‐day publishers, but it is made in the sincere hope that it may one day be realized. It has been made before without any definite details, but its general lines have been discussed among librarians for years past.