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While I agree with the broad theme of Jane Little's article in June NLW that there are not enough women in senior library posts, I feel that at least some of her points must be challenged.

A recently published book, The essential jazz records. Vol.1: Ragtime to swing, should become an essential item in any library's stock, whether it collects jazz records or not. Not only is it an excellent guide for the collector, but it is also a very readable history of jazz from its beginning to the end of the swing era and the beginning of the modern period. There are of course a number of histories of jazz, all of which contain references to records which illustrate the history. This book reverses the process by examining the records in chronological order of the period they cover and relating the records to the history they illustrate.

Not many weeks back, according to newspaper reports, three members of the library staff of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London were dismissed. All had refused to carry out issue desk duty. All, according to the newspaper account, were members of ASTMS. None, according to the Library Association yearbook, was a member of the appropriate professional organisation for librarians in Great Britain.

R F Vollans writes:Nothing pleases me more than to see honours bestowed on those who are worthy of them, particularly if they are my close friends and personal colleagues. It was, therefore, with some delight that I read of the LA'S new awards—the McColvin and Besterman Medals.

Libraries play a vital part in the communication network but there are a number of problems associated with library use, including location, cataloguing systems, absence of guiding, security systems, noise level, information technology, poor decor, image and staff attitudes. Concludes that more effective communication is needed between libraries and users.

MRS ANN DAVINSON has been appointed as Branch Librarian of the newly opened Barlby Branch of the East Riding County Library. Mrs Davinson has previously worked with Middlesbrough, Whitby and Widnes Public Libraries.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s there was a passion to develop the study of information for several reasons:

In 1962, the American Association of Law Libraries published the first edition of the present work. It was reviewed in this Journal (vol. 19, no. 1, 1963, p. 27), and perhaps not everything that was then said in its praise, although fully applicable to the second edition, need be repeated. The work was deservedly very successful and soon went out of print. The Association decided to revise it and Miss Finley, a leading practitioner of the art or science of private law librarianship, became, on her retirement, available to carry out the revision. The second edition is a substantial book bound in hard covers, has nearly twice the number of pages of the first, and, unlike its predecessor, is equipped with an index.

MALTBY, ARTHUR. U.K. catalogue use survey. London: Library Association, 1973. 35 p. Library Association research publication, no. 12. £1.25 (£1 to members). This report on the use and non‐use of the catalogue by readers describes the findings of a project carried out largely by the various schools of librarianship in April/May 1971. Two previous pilot studies had been carried out to refine the questionnaire to make it applicable throughout the United Kingdom. Special libraries were reluctantly excluded, but all other types of library were included. The method chosen was that of briefed interviewers and a structured interview, largely because it seemed desirable to catch not only those who use the catalogue, but also those who do not. Of the total of 3,252 interviewed, 1914 (59 per cent) actually used the catalogue; of the 41 per cent who never used the catalogue, the vast majority stated that they could manage without it, while 281 preferred to ask the staff. Probably most of this group went straight to the shelves. From the break‐down by type of library, it would seem that municipal and county libraries hardly need a catalogue at all. There is also the point that if more people had been shown how to use the catalogue, more would use it.

IN 1946 there was in the British Isles a clear image of librarianship in most librarians' minds. The image depended on a librarian's professional environment which was of the widest possible range, not less in variation than the organisations, institutes or types of community which required library services. Generalisations are like cocoanuts but they provide for the quickest precipitation of variant definitions, after the stones have been thrown at them. A generalisation might claim that, in 1946, public librarians had in mind an image of a librarian as organiser plus technical specialist or literary critic or book selector; that university and institute librarians projected themselves as scholars of any subject with a special environmental responsibility; that librarians in industry regarded themselves as something less than but as supplementing the capacity of a subject specialist (normally a scientist). Other minor separable categories existed with as many shades of meaning between the three generalised definitions, while librarians of national libraries were too few to be subject to easy generalisation.