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This paper aims to investigate how digital capabilities associated with building information modelling (BIM) can integrate a wide range of information to improve built asset management (BAM) decision-making during the in-use phase of hospital buildings.

A comprehensive document analysis and a participatory case study was undertaken with a regional NHS hospital to review the type of information that can be used to better inform BAM decision-making to develop a conceptual framework to improve information use during the health-care BAM process, test how the conceptual framework can be applied within a BAM division of a health-care organisation and develop a cloud-based BIM application.

BIM has the potential to facilitate better informed BAM decision-making by integrating a wide range of information related to the physical condition of built assets, resources available for BAM and the built asset’s contribution to health-care provision within an organisation. However, interdepartmental information sharing requires a significant level of time and cost investment and changes to information gathering and storing practices within the whole organisation.

This research demonstrated that the implementation of BIM during the in-use phase of hospital buildings is different to that in the design and construction phases. At the in-use phase, BIM needs to integrate and communicate information within and between the estates, facilities division and other departments of the organisation. This poses a significant change management task for the organisation’s information management systems. Thus, a strategically driven top-down organisational approach is needed to implement BIM for the in-use phase of hospital buildings.

STATISTICIANS tell us that since the war the proportion of male births has strikingly increased, and there is a theory that this increase represents the will of the Life Force working to remedy the ravages of the war. One wonders how much the recent vogue for walking, games, nude‐culture and hazardous exploits is attributable to the same cause. The significance of the hiking movement, which arose in war‐racked Germany and swept across the world, will not be overlooked by the social investigator of to‐morrow. It is true that there have always been hikers. But they were a small and scattered and unself‐conscious clan, usually nature lovers or naturalists, who walked, so to speak, casually and for the fun of it. Your latterday hiker is rather a hierophant of a cult. He has turned walking into a technique which he practises with a grim relish. He is distinctively—often clamorously—dressed. The heavy shoes, the iron‐shod stick, the aching feet, the perspiration, the sun‐vexed neck, the backbone cracking beneath prodigious impedimenta: the picture has been familiarized by the humorous journals from Punch upwards.

“Deep in all of us”, wrote a Homes and gardens sub‐editor in April 1965, headlining Elspeth Huxley's article A cottage on a hillside, “is a craving for a quiet country retreat, old, mellow and secluded.” If true, this had clearly been true of England at least for a very long while. “Of late there has been a positive spate of books about living in the country”, wrote Philip Gosse in 1935. “The rustic life is all the rage.” “The cult of the country cottage”, declared J. Gordon Allen in 1912, “which was thought a few years ago to be merely a passing whim, has recently developed apace”. The manner in which a sizeable proportion of the English middle class were persuaded over several decades to forsake or at least to contemplate forsaking urban living is of some interest to, amongst others, sociologists and social historians. Since we are concerned here with the bibliographical aspects of this radical shift of attitudes, it would be as well to dispose at the outset of one possible analysis: namely the idea that literary precedents had much to do with this. Agreed, masters of urban living much earlier than the English—the Romans—invented apparently the away‐from‐it‐all stance: Horace, generals returning to the plough with Rome saved, the Georgics. Agreed also, their Augustan imitators had much to say about places in the country. But consider Wootton's

SEPTEMBER is the month when, Summer being irrevocably over, our minds turn to library activities for the winter. At the time of writing the international situation is however so uncertain that few have the power to concentrate on schemes or on any work other than that of the moment. There is an immediate placidity which may be deceptive, and this is superficial even so far as libraries are concerned. In almost every town members of library staffs are pledged to the hilt to various forms of national service—A.R.P. being the main occupation of senior men and Territorial and other military services occupying the younger. We know of librarians who have been ear‐marked as food‐controllers, fuel controllers, zone controllers of communication centres and one, grimly enough, is to be registrar of civilian deaths. Then every town is doing something to preserve its library treasures, we hope. In this connexion the valuable little ninepenny pamphlet issued by the British Museum on libraries and museums in war should be studied. In most libraries the destruction of the stock would not be disastrous in any extreme way. We do not deny that it would be rather costly in labour and time to build it up again. There would, however, be great loss if all the Local Collections were to disappear and if the accession books and catalogues were destroyed.

THE evacuation brought many problems to the country districts—problems that those who ordered it had not bothered to think‐out beforehand. One suspects that the ministers responsible looked on it as an exercise in moving a million people from one place to another; and, when the million had been moved, congratulated themselves on another astounding success. But the moving was only the start. It was a far more difficult business to keep the evacuees in the country. That raised problems for everybody—including the rural librarian. Some people may say the evacuees didn't want to read anything except timetables for trains to take them home. The rural librarian, being a man of understanding, might have foreseen that demand and supplied it. But there are other and better ways in which the rural librarian might have helped and is helping. For the rural library can provide the evacuees with a substitute for the pleasures of town; and, more important in the longrun, can help them to understand that strange, almost foreign, thing—country life.

OUR readers are sure to find the New Year, which we hope will be a prosperous one for them and for librarianship,an interesting one in many ways. From the standpoint of the Library Association it will see the attractive experiment of an Annual Conference which for the first time is to be held in June. Margate, the venue of this, can be spartan in that month; on the other hand, she can be delightful, and the crystal, bracing air of the town, unequalled anywhere in our isles, and the long days, which should be sunny, ought to send librarians back invigorated to the common work of libraries. The objection that June cannot be combined with late summer holidays, that it cuts across school and university terms, and so on, is sound enough, but the advantages seem to be equally clear. At any rate we hope that Margate will be a bumper conference.

RUMOUR occupies so much of the human stage that the Editor of any library journal hesitates to do more than hope that the librarians he serves will be continuing their work uninterrupted by attack at the time his words reach them. This atmosphere is probably a part of the reason that actuates our correspondent Glaucon, whose Letter on Our Affairs this month is unusually virile in its attack upon those who would plan an after‐war world at a time when it is yet undecided whether or no there will be a world to plan. He represents a school of thought, if that name is not rather pedantic for these excellent critics, who believe that there should be no change while conflict continues and that to plan ahead of that is futile, because, as he argues, the men who will operate that world have not been called into consultation and cannot be at present. The experience of the past shows, too, that all such planning has been completely wasted effort; the coming generation would do what it thinks fit without reference to it. Finally he seems to think that when fighting ceases the men and women who survive will be so eager to get back to what they now believe to be their comfortable former state that that desire will overrule any schemes whatsoever.

OUR pages continue the discussion on book‐display, about which all has not been said by any means. The ingenious librarian will always sharpen his wits upon the attracting of readers, and the main problem in the matter is merely: what sort of reader is it most desirable to attract? We do not apologise for this reiteration, because it is the fundamental subject now facing librarians. We are not in the least moved by a comment in a contemporary that we are decrying libraries when we assert, and in spite of him we do assert, that fiction issues nearly all over London show a decline. That decline, we repeat, is due to the slight increase in the employment of readers, and to cheap fiction libraries. What the public librarian has to decide is if he shall compete with such libraries or more definitely diverge from them. If a middle course is preferred—as it usually is by Britons—what is that course? Ultimately, is the educated reader to be the standard for whom the library works, or the uneducated? Or, to put it another way, is the librarian in any way responsible for the quality of the books his community reads? Our readers, young and not so young, are invited to help us to answers to these live questions.

THE re‐organisation of local government in Greater London and the resultant amalgamation of library authorities is viewed by many with considerable misgivings. The upheaval of staff, the loss of status for some senior officers, the general uncertainty for the future—these are very real consequences of the Act and they cannot be ignored. Many chief librarians will see the work of a lifetime, perhaps spent in building up a comprehensive and unified system, made virtually meaningless overnight.

SEPTEMBER was free from large‐scale visits of bombers, and the arrangements the Associations made for meetings were realized. The Library Association, challenging the criticism that it was making no programme for the peace, requested its branches to produce ideas. Thus, those who made the criticism were asked to define their terms, as it were. The first outcome was a joint meeting of the London and Home Counties Branch and the A.A.L. which was held at the delightful new St. Marylebone Library on September 24th. Another joint meeting in London was that at the Institution of Electrical Engineers on September 26th, when the British Society of International Bibliography and A.S.L.I.B. actually met in quite substantial numbers to discuss the indexing and listing of periodicals. These activities are expressions of confidence in the future by librarians and those concerned with libraries. If the immediate results are not dramatic they keep us in good heart, and we hope will lead to other meetings.