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The Health and Safety at Work Act has been generally welcomed for its attempt to combat industry's death and injury toll. But Dr. Brenda Barrett and Dr. Richard Howells examine some vital contractual issues thrown up by the Act which pose problems for both employers and employees.

A research team at the Middlesex Polytechnic recently carried out a small‐scale study on behalf of the Health and Safety Executive to investigate the implementation by companies of certain new provisions of the Health and Safety at Work Act, 1974. These provisions are contained in Section 2 of the Act and require employers, inter alia, to inform and train their employees in safety matters and to consult on these matters with work‐place safety representatives appointed in pursuance of the Act.

The Robens committee on Safety and Health at Work recognised the cardinal importance of worker co‐operation with management if workplaces were to be made safer places and believed that worker involvement would help overcome the apathy which it felt was the primary cause of accidents at the workplace. The Health and Safety at Work Act apparently accepted the views of the Committee and created a statutory framework for individual and collective involvement in health and safety issues at the workplace. The Safety Representatives and Safety Committees Regulations subsequently made under the Act provided for the appointment of safety representatives by recognised trade unions possessing a variety of rights and functions. In doing so, however, they may arguably have owed more to the philosophy which conceived the Employment Protection Act's provisions for promoting the improvement of industrial relations and extension of collective bargaining than the Select Committee's desire for total workplace involvement.

In 1967 an academic wrote: “AA university is not a trade school for the production of plumbers”. He wrote about legal education which in England, as in many other countries, has a tradition of recognising academic study and vocational training as separate stages on the route to professional qualification. Thirty years ago universities catered for a relatively small sector of the population; concentrating on undergraduate studies for students entering at the age of 18. Notes the evolution in universities since that time and debates the experience universities should be providing for students today. It will suggest that the failure to distinguish the various forms of higher education is detrimental to the degree and this in turn is harmful to universities. It will conclude by questioning whether Dearing is likely to provide appropriate solutions to the problems

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

Since the first Volume of this Bibliography there has been an explosion of literature in all the main areas of business. The researcher and librarian have to be able to uncover specific articles devoted to certain topics. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume III, in addition to the annotated list of articles as the two previous volumes, contains further features to help the reader. Each entry within has been indexed according to the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus and thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid information retrieval. Each article has its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. The first Volume of the Bibliography covered seven journals published by MCB University Press. This Volume now indexes 25 journals, indicating the greater depth, coverage and expansion of the subject areas concerned.

A much quoted observation of Phelps Brown in the late 1950s was that “when British industrial relations are compared with those of the other democracies they stand out because they are so little regulated by law”. However, the position has changed so substantially since then that Lewis was able to comment that “in 1975 it would seem that the one indubitably fundamental and irreversible trend is the ever‐increasing extent of the legal regulation of the British system of industrial relations”. In view of this substantially changed state of affairs a fundamental task for industrial relations researchers to undertake is that of explaining variation in the impact of industrial relations legislation at the level of the individual employment establishment.

Knight's Industrial Law Reports goes into a new style and format as Managerial Law This issue of KILR is restyled Managerial Law and it now appears on a continuous updating basis rather than as a monthly routine affair.

THE centenary celebration is that of the apparently prosaic public library acts ; it is not the centenary of libraries which are as old as civilization. That is a circumstance which some may have overlooked in their pride and enthusiasm for the public library. But no real librarian of any type will fail to rejoice in the progress to which the celebration is witness. For that has been immense. We are to have a centenary history of the Public Library Movement—that is not its title—from the Library Association. We do not know if it will be available in London this month; we fear it will not. We do know its author, Mr. W. A. Munford, has spent many months in research for it and that he is a writer with a lucid and individual Style. We contemplate his task with a certain nervousness. Could anyone less than a Carlyle impart into the dry bones of municipal library history that Strew these hundred years, the bones by the wayside that mark out the way, the breath of the spirit that will make them live ? For even Edward Edwards, whose name should be much in the minds and perhaps on the lips of library lovers this month, could scarcely have foreseen the contemporary position ; nor perhaps could Carlyle who asked before our genesis why there should not be in every county town a county library as well as a county gaol. How remote the days when such a question was cogent seem to be now! It behoves us, indeed it honours us, to recall the work of Edwards, of Ewart, Brotherton, Thomas Greenwood, Nicholson, Peter Cowell, Crestadoro, Francis Barrett, Thomas Lyster, J. Y. M. MacAlister, James Duff Brown and, in a later day without mentioning the living, John Ballinger, Ernest A. Baker, L. Stanley Jast, and Potter Briscoe—the list is long. All served the movement we celebrate and all faced a community which had to be convinced. It still has, of course, but our people do now allow libraries a place, more or less respected, in the life of the people. Librarians no longer face the corpse‐cold incredulity of the so‐called educated classes, the indifference of the masses and the actively vicious hostility of local legislators. Except the illuminated few that existed. These were the men who had the faith that an informed people was a happier, more efficient one and that books in widest commonalty spread were the best means of producing such a people. These, with a succession of believing, enduring librarians, persisted in their Struggle with cynic and opponent and brought about the system and the technique we use, modified of course and extended to meet a changing world, but essentially the same. Three names we may especially honour this September, Edward Edwards, who was the sower of the seed; MacAlister, who gained us our Royal Charter ; and John Ballinger, who was the person who most influenced the introduction of the liberating Libraries Act of 1919.