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WITH the arrival of summer Uncle Shallow's thoughts invariably turn to visions of tranquil sun‐filled days by the sea. Over a lunch‐time drink, whilst we waited for the nurse who regularly accompanies the old boy to Bognor's sunshine home for retired gentlefolk of slender means, he asked me, ‘What do you think of the Barbican?’ ‘Thought the beer was a bit thin today’, I began. ‘Philistine! Ignoramus!’ Shallow spluttered, ‘Don't you read the newspapers? It's the City of London's new multi‐million pound cultural extravaganza. As it happens I know the Barbican librarian, Barry Cropper, quite well. Why don't you pop along there one day and ask him how they're getting along now that they've opened the library to the public? Then you could relieve me of the worry of my July column.’

The poster on this month's front cover featuring Barbican Library was commissioned by the Barbican Centre's marketing department (after consultation with the Library) as part of a series designed to promote those areas of the Centre's activities thought to be less well known to the general public than, for example, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the concert programme and the Art Gallery. The series cost around £30 000 but no cost fell on the Libraries Department.

Early in March of this year — at just about the same time that February's issue of NLW with its editorial on “Libraries and the Visiting Firemen” and Bryan Bacon's accompanying piece on British public libraries revisited plopped onto my desk — the Barbican Centre celebrated its third birthday. During those three years over 5.5 million visitors have followed our equivalent of Oz's yellow brick road: two thin yellow lines painted on the pavement from Moorgate and Barbican tube stations and leading into the heart of the Centre. The majority, of course, come to be entertained by the Royal Shakespeare Company or the London Symphony Orchestra, to view the latest exhibition in the Barbican Gallery or Concourse, to attend a conference or to see the latest release in Cinema One. Of that 5.5 million, however, over one million have visited and/or used the Barbican Library. As the City's largest lending library with a registered membership of almost 45,000 (and still growing) the majority of the 1300 people who visit the Library each day are, of course, coming in specifically to borrow books and sound recordings and — as such — are virtually indistinguishable from their library‐using counterparts elsewhere in the UK. Indeed, particularly within Greater London and the home counties, they are likely to be exactly the same people! Many, however, are visitors in the true sense of the term and a substantial proportion of them are “visiting firemen”.

The Corporation of London Library and Art Gallery Electronic (COLLAGE) identified the relative inaccessibility of their extensive visual collections – the prints, maps, photographs and ephemera held by Guildhall Library and the 4,000 plus works of art held by the Guildhall Art Gallery – as a challenge. Direct consultation with staff and existing users suggested that digitisation could enrich the catalogue and ensure wider access to the resources while ensuring the preservation of the originals for future generations. The public user interface is already online and, as resource discovery is the primary driver for the project, a direct link between COLLAGE and the library OPAC is planned to allow users to search “traditional” resources seamlessly alongside the images.

THE Barbican development was first thought of during that strange post‐war period of euphoria which gave us the Festival of Britain and bread rationing.

SINCE the Barbican Centre was officially launched it has displaced many times its own volume of other topics from most of our journals and newspapers. It is good for a para or two of knocking copy in any critic's column, no matter what the brief—local government, the arts, architecture or the state of the economy.

Learned Information Ltd, Besselsleigh Road, Abingdon, Oxford OX13 6LG has launched Information World Review now as a regular monthly newspaper for the European information industry. No.1 is dated February 1986 and the price is £18 per year. The purpose of the publication is to review what is happening in Europe's information industry, to draw attention to innovative products and services, and generally to give the sort of news that workers in the field would find interesting. It is difficult to judge from a first issue but, as the paper is not an entirely new venture, one would have expected it to seem less like a ‘specimen’ and to have more substance.

Continuing education for library and information management Ealing College of Higher Education is using a grant from BLR&DD to examine two main areas: para‐professional education and the coordination of external course provision. The present project, which runs from October 1985 to March 1986, is building on past work at Ealing. Ealing has developed a substantial database of short courses in librarianship and information science with details of cost, duration, location and subject. The work on para‐professional education will assess staff needs and will note experience in other countries, including the United States. The study of coordination will involve surveying course providers to see how they decide what courses to arrange, and how to price and market them. Further details are available from Dr Stephen Roberts, Ealing College of Higher Education, School of Library and Information Studies, St Mary's Road, Ealing, London W5 5RF (Tel: 01–579 4111 ext.3337).

This study contributes to the understanding of the health effects of pesticides exposure and of how pesticides have been and should be regulated.

This study presents literature reviews for the period 2000–2013 on (i) the health effects of pesticides and on (ii) preference valuation of health risks related to pesticides, as well as a discussion of the role of benefit-cost analysis applied to pesticide regulatory measures.

This study indicates that the health literature has focused on individuals with direct exposure to pesticides, i.e. farmers, while the literature on preference valuation has focused on those with indirect exposure, i.e. consumers. The discussion highlights the need to clarify the rationale for regulating pesticides, the role of risk perceptions in benefit-cost analysis, and the importance of inter-disciplinary research in this area.

This study relates findings of different disciplines (health, economics, public policy) regarding pesticides, and identifies gaps for future research.

To show how consumer researchers can learn from novels and analogous works of fiction.

Close reading of two recent novels, The Savage Girl by Alex Shakar and Jennifer Government by Max Barry.

The paper shows how works of fiction can be used as a intellectual resource by the consumer research community. It argues that fiction refreshed the parts that other research methods cannot reach.

Much depends on the caliber of the novels. Not every work of art is a work of genius. The article contends that consumer researchers need to move beyond singing the praises of fiction and, in pursuit of new paths to thick description, seek instead to novelise our findings. Or narrate them better at least.

Marketing practitioners might learn more from reading novels than the academic marketing literature.

There is nothing particularly original in the paper. It reiterates what several scholars have said already. The message is sufficiently important to warrant constant repetition, however.