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The news that the Ministry of Education has set up two Working Parties in connection with the proposed new Public Libraries Bill is welcome and gives further hope that such a Bill will appear in the not too distant future. From the constitutions of these Working Parties, which seem to us to be fairly representative of all interests, it would appear that the first is going to concern itself with the main aspects of the Roberts Report recommendations, while the second will be given the task of studying the problems of library co‐operation. On the first party, county libraries are represented by Miss Paulin and Mr. Budge, while Wales is represented by Mr. A. Edwards, librarian of the Cardiganshire and Aberystwyth Joint Library. Mr. D. I. Colley, the city librarian of Manchester, will be keeping a watching brief on behalf of the large libraries, but it should not be forgotten that he is also a member of the Libraries Committee of the Association of Municipal Corporations. Mr. Gardner is rightly there, perhaps not only as librarian of Luton but also as chairman of the Library Association's Executive Committee. The Smaller Libraries Group can surely have no complaints, for out of the ten members of Working Party No. I there are three librarians from smaller libraries, these being Mr. Helliwell of Winchester, Mr. Christopher of Penge and Mr. Parker of Ilkley. This Working Party is completed by two legal representatives in Mr. W. B. Murgatroyd, who is Town Clerk of Hornsey, and Mr. J. H. Oldham, who is Assistant County Solicitor for Kent.

Ten years ago, Professor McGregor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a book called The human side of enterprise. In it he described two theoretical assumptions of management, the old and the new. The old, he called theory X. In brief, theory X states that man is essentially lazy; carrots and sticks are required to get him to work at all; man lacks initiative and will do everything possible to avoid responsibility. The new, McGregor called theory Y. Theory Y states that work is natural to man; man will work hard; and will seek responsibility and show considerable initiative in the service of objectives to which he is committed.

There is a traditional tendency to think of managers and the managed as two quite separate classes of individual and I should like to make it clear therefore that when I refer to ways in which a manager can improve his effectiveness I am talking about anyone of you who, at a particular moment in time, is achieving his objectives through the agency of at least one other person. I would suggest that by this definition we are all managers, for even those few who in their jobs do not work through a subordinate must, in order to approach their objectives most effectively, manage either their peers or their seniors.

Reports that have reached us of the installation of Sir Philip R. Morris as President of the Library Association on January 28th assure us of the contribution he may make to the Association. As the retiring President, Mr. Oldman said, and as we know, his main interest has always been education and, as the Association has many projects in that field and some problems yet unsolved, he welcomed Sir Philip especially in that direction; but our new President has much experience of libraries in spite of his disclaimer of qualifications in our direction. He is a Carnegie Trustee and, unofficially, he connects us again with the body to which our profession owes so much and, as for lack of experience, one who has been Director of Education for Kent and therefore the ultimate official chief of the great County Library system there, cannot lack it. From what we hear of this speech—which we hope will be published in its complete but all too short length in the L.A. Record—we look ahead with confident pleasure to the Address he will give us at the Southport Conference in September.

ALTHOUGH the first Public Libraries (Scotland) Act was placed on the Statute Book in 1853, it was not until 1899 that the Corporation of the City of Glasgow was empowered to establish and maintain public libraries throughout the city. Between 1876 and 1897 four attempts were made to secure public approval for the adoption of the Public Libraries (Scotland) Acts, but when all these efforts proved unsuccessful, the Corporation decided in June, 1888 to include in a Local Bill for submission to Parliament, certain clauses conferring upon themselves the power to become a library authority. Promoted in 1899, the Bill became known as the Glasgow Corporation (Tramways, Libraries, etc.) Act 1899, and the library clauses passed through Parliament without opposition and received Royal Assent on 1st August, 1899. The powers conferred by this Local Act empowered the Corporation:

Some libraries and information services are quite definitely user‐centred; some think they are but are not always; some seem to be designed for librarians rather than users. The purpose of this monograph is to encourage the development of libraries to meet the perceived needs of users — I hope it will be found useful by librarians and information workers as well as by students.

A LEAN year faces many librarians and, of course, their Staffs as a result of the sudden but not unexpected bound in the cost of public services. It creates, as one well‐known librarian remarked in our hearing, not a crisis but an administrative problem. It is difficult to suggest a condition in which such circumstances may not occur from time to time; the former Stability of local government and its officers has been considerably weakened in recent years: a fact which may have unfortunate effects on the recruitment to this service. Most towns, however reluctantly, have accepted the fact that if municipal or other local services are to continue they must be paid for and, this is the essential, at current rates. The butcher, baker, and perhaps most obviously the builder, decorator, farmer and miner, will not serve them in their homes on any other terms. The proverb of cutting the coat according to the cloth means, of course, according to the weave and certainly has not the silly meaning given popularly to it for, if there is insufficient cloth, there can be no coat at all. It seems then that libraries have not all been deprived in the manner that has been the case in a few towns. As we write the national and international atmosphere has a touch of spring and therefore of promise in it and, while there is as yet no cause for jubilations, some optimism may be felt. Nevertheless, it takes a large library a long time to recover from a temporary mutilation of its services.

AS part of its three year research programme to draw up a code of practice and standards for the planning, organisation and lay‐out of metropolitan city libraries, the International Association of Metropolitan City Libraries (INTAMEL) met in Gothenburg in April 1969 to consider research studies and papers prepared during the previous year and to examine technically new city library developments and, later, in Stockholm and Copenhagen.

The immense strides made by technical research and therefore in technical education during the past thirty years have been readily appreciated. What is less obvious is that west London—an area which for this purpose lies between Staines and Kensington—has developed with remarkable rapidity during that period too. A quarter of Britain's light industry is now concentrated in that region, and in it are located no less than 3,800 firms of various sizes.

Under severely aggressive conditions, such as those experienced in the chemical industry, there has been extensive use of stainless steels in order to reduce corrosion losses. The successful industrial use of stainless steels led to requests for information on the corrosion resistance of stainless steels and similar alloys in sea‐water. This paper was awarded a prize in the Essay competition organised by the Corrosion Group of the Society of Chemical Industry, 1959.