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Partly in the unfolding course of events and partly by intention, we in the transatlantic/English‐speaking region of the world now have an established and standard bibliographic system for printed verbal media—books, serials, and microform. Among them, with some computer assistance, Bowker, H.W. Wilson, Whitaker, the Library of Congress, the British Library, the British Museum Library, and a number of supplementary publishers and collections provide major twentieth century in‐print means of access, as close to being comprehensive, reliable, and coordinated as can humanly be expected at present. You can be reasonably confident that if the information on a print medium exists, you can get it—“you” being either reference/ acquisitions staff or a user.

SHERRIE S. BERGMAN is College Librarian of Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. She served previously as director of the Roger Williams College Library and on the library reference staff at the New School for Social Research.

WHEN the open access method of lending books was first introduced on safe‐guarded lines at Clerkenwell, over twelve years ago, a considerable amount of dolorous prophecy was set free, which sometimes formed rather depressing reading for those responsible for the experiment. As time went on, it became clear that many of the prophets based their vaticinations on imperfect knowledge of the actual arrangements in use, and it was then only a simple matter of allowing complete play to one's sense of humour, while the comedy of errors proceeded. One imaginative prophet pictured the time when painstaking librarians would be supplanted by a uniformed janitor, who would assume the functions of librarian, by the easy process of supervising the filtration of readers through a turnstile, like sheep through a hurdle. Another equally resourceful Quidnunc saw in his mind's eye, all the riff‐raff of London, filing through the little Clerkenwell wicket, like a Cup‐tie crowd at the Crystal Palace, without introduction, guarantee, or slightest degree of responsibility. Probably it was only a humorist, and not a prophet, who forsaw the introduction of weighing machines at both entrance and exit wickets, as a means of preventing wholesale thefts. These, and many other absurd misconceptions of the actual mechanical arrangements employed to overcome various anticipated difficulties, formed a considerable proportion of the prophetic utterances which advertised the open access system in its early days.

With the job market as it is for many college graduates, it is more important than ever that students choose those professional and graduate schools which will best meet their individual needs and help them achieve their goals. The process of graduate school selection is often difficult, but libraries can facilitate the process with a good collection of specialized guides to graduate schools, frequently obtainable at little cost.

The difficulty of standardising the clinical diagnosis has led workers in the field of nutrition to suggest alternative methods. Thus, tables of average weights for each sex at specified ages and for particular heights have been frequently used in studies of nutrition, an arbitrary limit of 10 per cent.of the average being usually taken as separating the undernourished from those reasonably nourished. It is generally recognised, however, that, owing to the variation in body weight, even of persons of the same sex, age, and height, the use of these tables may, on the one hand, fail to pick out really undernourished individuals, and, on the other hand, may place those who are perfectly healthy in the category of undernourished. For this reason, therefore, various formulæ, based largely on the relationship of height and weight, have been proposed from time to time. The best‐known are as follows:—