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The University of Otago Library conducted a review of its postgraduate support program in 2018. The purpose of this paper is to report on the findings of a questionnaire and follow up focus group undertaken as part of the review. It highlights postgraduate student preferences for learning about support services, their ideas on marketing these services effectively and the kind of engagement that works best for them.

A questionnaire was developed and deployed in July 2018. It contained 20 questions and was emailed to 2,430 enrolled Otago doctorate and master’s students by the University of Otago (GRS). A total of 564 responded, 391 completing all questions. A follow-up focus group was held in August 2018. Quantitative data were collected and analyzed using Qualtrics software and qualitative data were coded and analyzed using NVivo software.

Respondents highlighted the difficulty they have learning what support services are available to them. In some cases, they also feel a stigma when seeking help because of their status as postgraduate students. They suggest practical ways libraries can better reach out to them. The findings confirm previous literature about the need for libraries to improve marketing of their services to postgraduate students, communicate via supervisors and departments where possible and provide a variety of engagement options.

Before (re)developing postgraduate programs, libraries can gain valuable insights and test assumptions by surveying students.

With this issue of RSR we present the first of our annual subject surveys of new reference publications. Each survey is by a librarian who is actively involved in the selection and interpretation of reference materials in his subject field and thus is conversant with recent trends in publishing, pertinent bibliographic data bases, and emerging networks. Each is especially qualified to analyze these trends and to judge which reference books of the year past are outstanding. Mr. Balachandran, a reference librarian in the Commerce Library, University of Illinois, is primarily responsible for selecting reference materials and other monographic publications. He holds a master's degree in economics and a Juris Doctor from the University of Illinois. Jimmie Hoover, in addition to being Document Librarian at Louisiana State University since 1967, has edited recent editions of Bookman's Guide to Americana. In his survey of Documents reference he was assisted by Nancy demons, a colleague at LSU in the Documents Department, formerly Documents Librarian at Samford University Library in Birmingham, Alabama. Our specialist in children's reference, Alice Smith, has been until recently chair‐person of the Department of Library Science/Audio‐Visual Education at the University of South Florida. She is now devoting full time to teaching and writing. Dr. Smith has taught a wide range of courses in selection and reading guidance in the area of juvenile literature, including the History of Children's Literature, Building Library Collections, and Bibliotherapy. Jack Weigel has a B.S. in mathematics, a master's in physics and held successively the positions of Mathematics Librarian and Physics Librarian at Columbia University. He is now head of the Physics/Astronomy Library at the University of Michigan.

bell hooks says in “Reconstructing Black Masculinity” that n[c]ollectively we can break the life threatening choke‐hold patriarchal masculinity imposes on black men and create life sustaining visions of a reconstructed black masculinity that can provide black men ways to save their lives and the lives of their brothers and sisters in struggle. Toward the work of political (re)unification of the genders in black communities today, black men must acknowledge and begin to confront the existence of sexism in black liberation struggle as one of the chief obstacles empeding its advancement. Making womanist space for black men to participate in allied relation to feminist movement to oppose the opression of women means black men going against the grain of the racist and sexist mythology of black manhood and masculinity in the U.S. Its underlying premise rooted in white supremacist patriarchal ideology continues to foster the idea that we pose a racial and sexual threat to American society such that our bodies exist to be feared, brutalized, imprisoned, annihilated‐made invisible.

Reference books for use by children and older youth and their librarians, media specialists, teachers, and sometimes by parents, are often quite different in type, scope and appearance than those works which are consistently used by adults as reference books.

In surveying the state of the art of reference materials for children and young adults in both school and public libraries, it is necessary to reaffirm certain “givens” about such a broad field. As in any other library, selection depends so much upon the clientele. A K — 3 grade school would have simple encyclopedias (of which there are few), e.g. Childcraft (Field), the Golden Encyclopedias, picture dictionaries and similar materials. The K — 6 or the K — 8 would include these and increasingly sophisticated types of reference, depending upon budget and the reading or research interests of the children. For example, some elementary school age children seriously want to know “all there is” about solar energy, computers, transistors, comic books and beasts of the tar pits. Others want only “facts” about sports heroes, stamps, or other collectibles. High school students are interested in the same pursuits, many of them at a highly sophisticated level. Young patrons of public libraries, quite often, are either the most proficient in reading and research skills, or the most lacking in any kind of conceptual application. Therefore, reference collections for this widely spaced age group are diverse in definition, scope, and numbers of volumes. Indeed, some books at an elementary age level are designated reference for three major reasons: 1) to direct children to a book which they might want but cannot find unless it is limited in the place or time allowed for use (e.g. some books on codes); 2) books that are comprehensive and include a quick fact presentation (these are often found in the 500's, 600's, etc., as a general categorical statement, but such a location is not always understood by the very small child who wants information; or 3) the dictionaries, encyclopedias and other books of encyclopedia information as understood by adults but written on a very beginning level. Too often, a college or general public librarian does not understand the microscopic pieces of information that are reference in nature to the growing child. Ideally, this type of reference should be available in kindergarten or even in pre‐school with instruction in its use (which is “fun” oriented, for learning is fun to the small child) at the same school or pre‐school levels.

The ACEI (Association for Childhood Education International) in its five year interval Bibliography of Books For Children includes a spearate section on reference books for children. One aspect of this section is a presentation of the “State of the Art” as far as reference materials for elementary school age children are concerned. Textbooks on literature for children also include a lesser narrative and bibliographic section on reference books for elementary‐age children. Recent publications such as Carolyn Sue Peterson's give book‐length multi‐page descriptions of optimum reference book collections for elementary grade schools, junior high schools and high schools. No one of these attempts to say categorically that the state of the art of reference materials for children and young adults is at this stage progressing historically from few reference books for children to a late twentieth century plethora of richness and complexity. Peterson gives dates of the initial editions of many works and states that there are many gaps in the areas covered by reference books printed for children and young people.

‘Countrymindedness’ is a resonant but perhaps manufactured term, given wide currency in a 1985 article by political scientist and historian Don Aitkin in the Annual, Australian Cultural History. Political ideology was his focus, as he charted the rise and fall ‐ from the late nineteenth century to around the 1970s ‐ of some ideological preconceptions of the Australian Country Party. These were physiocratic, populist, and decentralist ‐ physiocratic meaning, broadly, the rural way is best. Aitkin claimed the word was used in Country Party circles in the 1920s and 1930s, but gave no examples. Since the word is in no dictionary of Australian usage, or the Oxford Dictionary, coinage may be more recent. No matter. Countrymindedness is a richly evocative word, useful in analysing rural populism during the last Australian century. I suggest it can usefully be extended to analyzing aspects of the inner history of Euro‐settlement in recent centuries.

This section of the survey is concerned with the historical development of English language dictionaries for children and young people through beginning college years. Excluded are dictionaries of eponyms, etymologies, foreign words and phrases, homonyms and homophones, regional dialect, rhymes, slang, synonyms and homonyms and other compendiums of silmilar nature. Thesauri are briefly touched upon. These limitations apply solely to this section of the column; new reference books received by the writer, no matter what their category, are reviewed in Part II.

Having discussed amiably with the editor the importance of women in the American library field, he responded with a request for some of my memories of individual ladies whom I had known professionally and for whom I had high regard. First I must admit that my field has been the public library and the activities of state libraries and library commissions in the extension of public library service. Undoubtedly in university and endowed reference libraries the men in the field showed up more prominently just as they did in activities and decisions of the American Library Association. However, when John Cotton Dana spoke cogently at a conference we did not forget the equally forceful and intelligent Beatrice Winser who had so great a part in running the Newark Public Library of which Mr. Dana was director. This is but one example plucked at random and I do not like to have these indispensable co‐workers ignored.

EVERY librarian in his inmost heart dislikes newspapers. He regards them as bad literature; attractors of undesirable readers; a drain upon the limited resources of the library; and a target against which the detractors of public libraries are constantly battering. From the standpoint of the librarian, newspapers are the most expensive and least productive articles stocked by a library, and their lavish provision is, perhaps, the most costly method of purchasing waste‐paper ever devised. Pressure of circumstances and local conditions combine, however, to muzzle the average librarian, and the consequence is that a perfectly honest and outspoken discussion of the newspaper question is very rarely seen. In these circumstances, an attempt to marshal the arguments for and against the newspaper, together with some account of a successful practical experiment at limitation, may prove interesting to readers of this magazine.