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From 2021, prices began to rise sharply in many European countries without incomes keeping up. Under such circumstances, households partly depend on government intervention to moderate the effects of inflation. Segments of the population will also depend on welfare schemes to stay financially afloat and avoid severe detriment and poverty. This article asks how well welfare states protect households in a cost-of-living crisis. Based on Esping-Andersen's regime theory, two countries are investigated: the United Kingdom and Norway, which represent the liberal and the social-democratic model, respectively. The empirical analysis shows that both countries introduced first- and second-level measures to mitigate the cost-of-living crisis at the household level. The fall in financial well-being was greater in Norway than in the United Kingdom due to late and less generous second-level targeted payments to vulnerable households. However, while such support may alleviate the difficulties of dealing with price increases, it tends to be time-limited, while high prices persist following periods of rapid inflation. In conclusion, the ideal would be to have generous first-level permanent transfers that protect people's standard of living and to adjust the provisions promptly to compensate as prices increase.

IT IS PERHAPS with wry understatement that the recent public declaration by the Library Association Council on the subject of library expenditure includes the remark that ‘The Library Association does not claim that libraries should be exempt from the economies which must now be borne by all’, for it has been manifestly apparent, since some dim realisation of national economic crisis first began to seep into the quasi‐cerebral thought processes of those who conduct government and local government, that the first neck upon which the sharpness of the axe would be tested has been library services everywhere.

CORRESPONDING with a widening of the scope of the Heating and Ventilating Research Association to become the Building Services Research and Information Association, there is an increased emphasis placed on the information and advisory aspects of the service.

THE HARDCORE staff establishment at the Library Association has been in a positive tizzy of excitement since somebody ‘leaked’ to them a couple of months ago the news that NEW LIBRARY WORLD is to have a new Editor.

‘I'M MINERVA. ASK ME. Out goes the image of the bespectacled, disapproving librarian, the woman who makes you feel frivolous for taking out nothing more weighty than philosophy. In comes the newstyle library hostess, smart, alluring, shaped for confidences.

Accountancy glossary Differences in technical jargon almost invariably occur on the two sides of the Atlantic—and accountancy is no exception to the rule.

YOU ARE probably wondering what has happened to Industrial Library News. In taking over from Alan Armstrong I should like to broaden the coverage of these columns to cover current technical and commercial library news in general. So if you feel that the services you run, committee you serve on or publications you produce would be of interest to others I should be delighted to hear from you at Lambeth Reference Library, Brixton Oval, London SW2 Tel: 01–274 7451 ext 32.

COMPARISON of the amount and the variation between 1975/76 and 1976/77 of public library bookfunds is made possible by the Libtrad summary which was published in the Bookseller in mid‐April. It is encouraging to see that although there is a fair number of falls and no‐changes, many chiefs have been successful in extracting higher book‐funds from their authorities—no mean achievement in a year which has seen a pretty general standstill in rate demands. Essex is up by no less than 30%, and the percentage increases are in double figures in not a few cases. My own home borough is up by exactly one‐third, though it still only reaches the miserly total of £115,000 for a population of 200,000—well down the per capita league for London boroughs.

The new British Institute of Management Information Centre was officially opened on June 5 by Viscount Watkinson, the institute's president.

K C HARRISON, City Librarian of Westminster, past‐President of the LA and present Chairman of the association's General Purposes Committee, has been invested a Knight (First Class) of the Order of the Lion of Finland for services to Finnish public libraries.