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Comparisons between New York Police Department (NYPD) drug‐allegation data and data from users' and sellers' self‐reports about crack, powder cocaine and heroin provided useful insights about the allocation of police resources via drug‐allegation data.

Central Harlem was divided into 45 primary sampling units (PSUs) with two years of NYPD data organized in three strata, high, mid or low allegations/capita. In nine randomly selected PSUs (three/stratum), interviewers employed chain referral sampling, steered with a nomination technique.

NYPD drug‐allegation data concurred more often with self‐report data concerning crack use/sales, but underestimated use/sales of powder cocaine and heroin. Mid‐level PSUs had proportions of crack users/sellers similar to high‐level PSUs. Mid‐ and low‐level PSUs often had high proportions of powder cocaine and heroin users/sellers.

The enumeration of crack users/sellers produced results similar to NYPD data because crack use/sales may be more easily detected and willingly reported by citizens, police informants and police officers. Powder cocaine and heroin use/sellers enumerated were less noted in the NYPD drug allegations.

Provides insights into a question not addressed in previous research – how much and what kinds of drug activity are indicated by NYPD drug‐allegation data.

David L. Altheide is Emeritus Regents’ Professor in the School of Justice and Social Inquiry at Arizona State University. Using qualitative methodology, his work has focused on the role of mass media and information technology for social control. His two most recent books are: Terrorism and the Politics of Fear (Alta Mira, 2006) and Terror Post 9/11 and the Media (Lang, 2009). The former work as well as Creating Fear: News and the Construction of Crisis (Aldine/Transaction, 2002) received the Cooley Award as the best books for the year in the tradition of symbolic interaction, from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. Dr. Altheide also won this award in 1986 for his book Media Power, and he is the 2005 George Herbert Mead Award recipient for lifetime contributions from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction.

THE attendance at the Library Association Conference was, after all, a normal one of about twelve‐hundred delegates and their wives. There is always a lift of those who are unable to intimate their intention to attend until after the list in the programme has been printed. If it is longer this year it may be in part due to the uncertainty caused by the municipal elections, but only in part, as quite a number were not municipal people in the official sense at all. However that may be, it was a worth‐while meeting in which the address by President Lionel McColvin was certainly the outstanding feature, as providing a candid survey of the faults, the achievements and suggestions as to the prospects of the public library service. As our correspondent suggests elsewhere, the Conference Proceedings in extenso are available to all our readers in the separate volume the Library Association publishes and we need not attempt to reproduce the quality of the Address, but, as also is suggested, we hope the branches, sections and other groups of librarians will have point by point discussions on its substance in the months ahead.

This section of the survey is concerned with the historical development of English language dictionaries for children and young people through beginning college years. Excluded are dictionaries of eponyms, etymologies, foreign words and phrases, homonyms and homophones, regional dialect, rhymes, slang, synonyms and homonyms and other compendiums of silmilar nature. Thesauri are briefly touched upon. These limitations apply solely to this section of the column; new reference books received by the writer, no matter what their category, are reviewed in Part II.

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

A subject that often causes trouble for reference librarians is federal income tax research and the use of tax services. This article describes the sources of federal income tax law, sources used to interpret the tax laws, and the services that pull all of this information together for the researcher.

“We are really a family concern,” said Mr. John Carter, referring to Routledge & Kegan Paul of which he is chairman; and the same, in different degrees, could be said of the three other London publishing houses which I have been visiting. Longmans and Murrays are eminent examples.

You never know, that's all, there's no way of knowing … Last week our lives were all right … But now I think we're going to be murdered. Just like that.” So begins The Shadow Knows, a novel whose major theme is a woman's panic about the possibility of danger to her family. She is not alone; Americans are increasingly fearful of violence as it becomes more pervasive. According to the 1982–83 Statistical Abstract of the U.S., published by the Bureau of the Census, one of every 30 people over 12 years old was the victim of violence in 1980. And those statistics refer only to reported violence; they do not include the victims of private violence: child abuse, incest, or spouse beating. Such domestic violence more than doubled between 1976 and 1981, and accounts for more than one‐third of the nation's police forces' time. The statistics pertaining to women are particularly worrisome. A woman's chances of being raped at some point in her life are now one in ten—and her chances of being injured by battery are even greater. Such statistics are very frightening.