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I am proud to be known as an expert by experience in recovery from mental distress, but I am also a co‐founder and director of a multi‐award winning, peer‐led charity called Changes 12 Steps to Mental Health. In the 1980s, after experiencing my third breakdown, I was an extremely angry person because of the lack of cross‐sector service provision to assist me in becoming whole again. Thankfully I used my rage to develop, along with my co‐founder Dave Wheat, our Changes 12 Steps to Mental Health services to meet the needs of those in mental distress. Changes 12 Steps to Mental Health provides person‐focused, recovery‐rooted services that aim to promote recovery, enabling people to become contributing members of society again. This is the history of Changes 12 Steps to Mental Health, our achievements and the challenges that we have faced in developing the services that we provide today.

THE Reference Department of Paisley Central Library today occupies the room which was the original Public Library built in 1870 and opened to the public in April 1871. Since that date two extensions to the building have taken place. The first, in 1882, provided a separate room for both Reference and Lending libraries; the second, opened in 1938, provided a new Children's Department. Together with the original cost of the building, these extensions were entirely financed by Sir Peter Coats, James Coats of Auchendrane and Daniel Coats respectively. The people of Paisley indeed owe much to this one family, whose generosity was great. They not only provided the capital required but continued to donate many useful and often extremely valuable works of reference over the many years that followed. In 1975 Paisley Library was incorporated in the new Renfrew District library service.

For the past twenty‐five years or so, the writings of George Orwell — especially his final novel 1984 — have been a popular topic for student research. From junior high through graduate school, interest in Orwell has been consistent. Book reports, term papers, and even seminars on Orwell are common‐place in the national curriculum. Now, as the year 1984 arrives, librarians at all levels — public, school, academic — must brace themselves for a year‐long onslaught of requests for biographical and critical material on Orwell.

People who are living with dementia are core health service users, but there are ongoing concerns about the quality of their care and the need for improved education of healthcare staff. The purpose of this paper is to report a qualitative study that investigated staff perspectives on an ethnodrama (“Barbara’s Story”) which was used to educate an entire health service workforce and promote a person-centred approach to care.

The study used a qualitative, longitudinal design with focus groups held with clinical (nurses, allied health professionals, medical) and non-clinical staff. In Phase 1 there were ten focus groups (n=67 participants) and one individual interview. In Phase 2 there were 16 focus groups (n=77 participants) and three individual interviews.

Barbara’s Story raised awareness of dementia, engaged staff emotionally and prompted empathetic responses and improved interactions. The project’s senior leadership, whole organisation and mandatory approach were well-supported, with a perceived impact on organisational culture. The project helped to embed practice developments and initiatives to support person-centred care. Barbara’s Story is now well-integrated into the organisation’s practices, supporting its sustainability in use.

Whilst there are increasing resources for educating about dementia, there are fewer evaluations, particularly for large-scale educational initiatives, and a lack of focus on long-term effects. The study findings indicate that education about dementia can be delivered to a whole workforce in a sustainable manner, to prompt empathy, raise awareness, support person-centred care and impact on individual behaviour and organisational culture.

THE Newcastle school, like most others, was established after the second world war to provide full‐time education in librarianship as an alternative to the part‐time system which until 1946 was the only one available to the majority of librarians. At first most of the students were returning servicemen whose library careers had been interrupted by the war and they were followed by students direct from libraries, universities and schools. From a handful of students and one full‐time member of staff in the first year the school has grown steadily until there were 53 students and five staff during the session 1962–3 which was the last course held for the Registration Examination.

This issue is a selected bibliography covering the subject of leadership.

THE greatly increased interest in historical studies since the second world war has been, I hope, a welcome challenge to librarians, but it has been very difficult to meet it. That the librarians of our new universities should have had little research material to offer was only to be expected. Unfortunately, research scholars have discovered that our older libraries were also deficient, that source materials had either not been purchased, in the years when they were readily available, or had been acquired only to be discarded at a later date. Recently, therefore, both old libraries and new have found themselves in competition for a small and dwindling supply of out‐of‐print publications.

The Amelia Frances Howard‐Gibbon medal of the Canadian Library Association, established in 1971 to honour outstanding illustrators of Canadian children's books, has been awarded this year to William Kurelek for A Prairie Boy's Summer, published in Montreal by Tundra Books. Kurelek was born near Whitford in Alberta but spent most of his early life in a Ukrainian farming community in Manitoba and his illustrations vividly capture life on a prairie farm in the '30s.

As both concept and process, privatization possesses ambiguous connotations and multiple meanings. Webster's Dictionary (1981) defines one related noun, privatism, as “an attitude of uncommitment or uninvolvement in anything beyond one's immediate interests,” while another associated noun, privacy, denotes a state of “withdrawal from society or the public interest” (Oxford English Dictionary, 1972). If government is a means of providing a wide range of collective goods, which do not necessarily lend themselves to market exchange, the public sector is naturally a highly visible target.⁴ At the same time, unrestrained public-sector expansion inevitably leads to public policy failure, as problems of communication, coordination, effective cost–benefit control, and revenue satiation accumulate.⁵ Privatization represents a logical reaction.