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My colleagues have dealt most admirably with two detailed aspects of starting a new library from scratch; with a certain amount of low cunning, I have reserved for myself the task of speaking more generally about the end product of their efforts—for books, no matter how lavishly they are provided, and buildings, no matter how well planned and executed, are only the essential preparation or raw material for the librarian's proper task of getting information (whether in books or serials or pamphlets or videotape) to the people who need it.

During the planning period of Lancaster University Library, much thought was given to the available methods of producing unit cards for the catalogue. The prime considerations were speed of production, since it was estimated that an output of twenty thousand sets of entries would be required each year, and economy in operation; in our situation, with all capital costs being met by a direct non‐recurrent grant from the UGC, the initial outlay was not such a critical factor in the choice, but obviously had to be taken into consideration. The appearance and quality of the finished entries were also important.

In presenting some account of the work being done at Lancaster on the systems analysis of a university library, I wish to make it quite clear at the beginning what I do not mean. We are not concerned with “scientific management” as defined in the recent book by Dougherty and Heinritz — time and motion study, work measurement or work simplification, the re‐design of forms and stationery, and all the other paraphernalia of low‐level industrial or commercial management. These admittedly have their place, but only a minor one: it profits a library little if its procedures are all perfect, but all directed to the wrong ends.

It is with great regret that the Editorial Board has learned that Miss Barbara Kyle has been compelled by a serious illness to resign her appointments as Research Librarian of Aslib and Managing Editor of the Journal of Documentation, which she has held with distinction since 1962. Readers of the Journal and its contributors (among whom she has often been numbered) cannot have failed to note the smooth efficiency with which Miss Kyle has carried out the complicated task of ensuring that its successive parts have appeared punctually and in good order: the Editorial Board will continue to benefit from her wide experience, since she remains one of its members.

Given the current situation of the world's developed nations, it is hardly surprising that the economical organization of libraries is an area of study which has aroused considerable interest over the past few years; a large amount of work has been done in both America and Britain, and a number of bibliographies and literature reviews have appeared (e.g. 1–4). No attempt will be made here to be similarly exhaustive, since the object of the Progress in Documentation series is to highlight only the most significant contributions to the current state‐of‐the‐art; a further self‐imposed limitation is that every item quoted should be, in the reviewer's opinion, either actually or potentially useful to the librarian‐at‐the‐shelf, who has to turn his mind to the practicalities of operating a real system. It is all very well to treat library management as an academic exercise, a way‐station in the career development of a management scientist, as we see in all too many published examples—one, which shall remain anonymous, produces some elegant models and manipulations, but openly admits that the data required to make them operable do not exist, and moreover could never be collected; but if the librarian cannot follow what the researcher is saying, or see any benefit from applying his results or methods, then from the practical point of view the research might as well not have been carried out or published. It is unfortunately true that there is a great gulf fixed between the two sides: the librarian neither understands, nor wishes to bother with, the detailed mathematical treatment of models, while the theorist is not interested in any problem which is conceptually simple, even though in practical terms it may be difficult to solve. What is needed in this area is common sense, the ability to think at large, untrammelled by received professional wisdom, and to relate the converging products of many separate disciplines to the problem in hand; this is why the research teams which have achieved the most significant results are those which contain a mixture of librarians and management scientists.

Nearly fourteen years ago my colleague at the University of Glasgow, R. O. MacKenna, wrote in the Journal of Documentation what is virtually the paper I am going to read today (although perhaps I am in a position to translate into practice things which he could only, at that time, discuss in a theoretical way). He called reader instruction ‘a university library problem’; it is still a problem, but there are signs that it is one which is on the way to being solved, or at least one which we now know how to solve if we only had the financial resources to implement the solution.

I am not sure whether I was asked to give this paper as an innovator, a researcher and developer, or a user. If I claim to have some elements of all three, this presumably exonerates me from having to be expert at any one of them. I should perhaps say that I see all three as closely interlinked: for me, at any rate, all worthwhile library and information research has arisen out of strictly practical problems, which present knowledge is inadequate to solve; and these problems occur to one as a librarian trying to give an adequate service within various economic, social and political constraints—the definition of an adequate service being arrived at by seeing the library through the consumer's eyes, and by using it oneself as a consumer.

Southampton University Library has been considering using either data processing equipment, or the services of a computer, to speed up Library routines for some time. In 1964/5, a sub‐committee of the Library Committee produced a programme for Library development up to 1980, for which I prepared a report on Library uses of both data processing equipment and computers. When we learnt that the University was to have an I.C.T. 1907 computer, the data processing section was omitted from the report.

A SPLENDID conference, I thought. True, there were those who complained, those who thought some of the papers were elementary and those who thought that we had come a long way to learn very little. I don't agree at all. Some of the papers did, I admit, deal with basic considerations but it does nothing but good to re‐examine the framework of our services from time to time. In any case other papers were erudite, and for the first time I have seen an audience of librarians and authority members stunned, almost, into silence.

A survey of acquisitions over a three month period used the same methods as earlier unpublished surveys conducted by four neighbouring university libraries. Acquisitions are analysed by country, language and date of publication. The time taken to acquire publications is measured. The currency and coverage of centrally produced cataloguing records are discussed. Some comparisons with earlier results are made.