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Locally based policing ‐ involving co‐operation with local residents and agencies, is a key requirement of the government's police reform agenda. This article reports the findings of an evaluation of one such initiative that involved residents in determining policing strategy on two urban housing estates. On one estate there were positive outcomes, but there was little change in the other. This appeared to be related to the range of skills possessed by the officers on the two sites.

This study examined the impact of a brief seminar series on positive parenting (Selected Triple P) on behavioural and emotional problems in pre‐adolescent children and on inter‐parental conflict, parenting style, relationship quality, parental adjustment and parental confidence. Two hundred and forty‐four parents with children aged four to seven years were assigned to one of three conditions: (a) partial exposure condition involving attendance at a single introductory seminar; (b) full exposure (attendance at all three seminars); or (c) a waitlist control group. Analyses were completed for the 109 participants for whom full data were obtained. There was a significant reduction in parental reports of problem child behaviour and dysfunctional parenting styles with the introductory seminar alone. However, exposure to all three seminars was associated with significant improvements in all dysfunctional parenting styles and in the level of inter‐parental conflict. There were no significant differences between conditions at post‐intervention on parental reports of depression, anxiety, stress, relationship quality or parental confidence. This study provides preliminary support for the efficacy of a brief universal parenting intervention in improving child behaviour and parenting variables associated with the development and maintenance of child conduct problems. The findings also offer preliminary support for the notion that positive outcomes for both parents and children can be achieved through the delivery of brief preventive parenting interventions that require minimal time commitments from parents.

A recent Aslib Research Department Project which investigated problems relating to the construction of thesauri for indexing and retrieval ended with two publications, to be published shortly by Aslib. During the project, extensive use was made of the thesauri held in the Aslib Library, and information about them was tabulated. Information concerning openly available thesauri is displayed below.

I first met punched feature cards in 1956. I was working as an assistant to E. G. Brisch, whose company classified the materials and components used in industry. His method brought similar articles together, both notionally in classified codebooks and practically when the classified items were stored in their code number order. The result was an excellent aid to variety reduction, standardization, and stock control. E. G. gave me a good grounding in analytical classification; but his office held other secrets too. One of these was a sort of punched card representing a property or quality, not an object or event as with all other punched cards I had met. On these other cards, notched or slotted for hand‐sorting with needles, or punched and verified in thousands for reading by machine, the holes stood for characteristics possessed by the item concerned. The new cards were different. Since they represented properties, the items possessing these had to be shown by the holes, and so they were. E. G. named them ‘Brisch‐a‐boo’: this I found was his special variant of ‘peek‐a‐boo’, a title by which they are still occasionally known. To stack some of them in exact register with each other is to find, as a set of through holes in numbered positions, the reference numbers of all the items recorded on them which have the qualities concerned.

Present thought and action relating to satisfaction and motivation of teachers appear to he based on the assumption that job factors which satisfy teachers and job factors which dissatisfy teachers are arranged on a conceptual continuum. This paper tests an alternate assumption which was proposed by Frederick Herzbcrg and his associates. Herzberg suggests that job factors which satisfy workers and job factors which dissatisfy workers are not arranged on a conceptual continuum but are mutually exclusive. The findings of the study reported here revealed that some factors, reported by teachers as contributing to their job satisfaction and job dissatisfaction, were polar in a positive direction and other factors were polar in a negative direction. Achievement, recognition and responsibility were factors which contributed predominantly to teacher job satisfaction. Interpersonal relations (students), interpersonal relations (peers), “supervision technical”, school policy and administration, unfairness, status and personal life were factors which contributed predominantly to teacher dissatisfaction. Further, the satisfaction factors identified for teachers tend to focus on the work itself and the dissatisfaction factors tend to focus on the conditions of work. The results of this study tend to support the universality of Herzberg's findings.

A description is given of the English Electric ‘Thesaurofacet’, a faceted classification and thesaurus covering engineering and related scientific, technical, and management subjects. A novel feature of the system is the integration of the classification schedules and thesaurus. Each term appears both in the thesaurus and in the schedules. In the schedules the term is displayed in the most appropriate facet and hierarchy: the thesaurus supplements this information by indicating alternative hierarchies and other relationships which cut across the classified arrangement. The thesaurus also controls word forms and synonyms and acts as the alphabetical index to the class numbers. The resulting tool is multipurpose, as easily applicable to shelf arrangement and conventional classified card catalogues as to co‐ordinate indexing and computerized retrieval systems. The reasons are given for modifying certain traditional facet techniques, including the choice of traditional disciplines for main classes, the lack of a ‘built‐in’ preferred order, and the me, in certain instances, of enumeration rather than synthesis to express multi‐term concepts. Methods of application of the Thesaurofacet in pre‐coordinate and post‐coordinate systems are discussed and a brief account is given of the techniques employed in its compilation.

The following bibliography focuses mainly on programs which can run on IBM microcomputers and compatibles under the operating system PC DOS/MS DOS, and which can be used in online information and documentation work. They fall into the following categories:

The emergence of evidence‐based medicine has implications for the use and development of information retrieval systems which are not restricted to the area of medicine. ‘Evidence‐based’ practice emphasises the retrieval and application of high quality knowledge in order to solve real‐world problems. However, information seeking to support such evidence‐based approaches to decision making and problem solving makes demands on retrieval systems which they are not well suited at present to satisfy. A number of approaches have been developed in the field of medicine that seek to address these limitations. The extent to which such approaches may be applied to other areas is discussed, as are their limitations.

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.