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UBM is a well‐known builders merchants group with turnover of £112m and 130 branches, and the company's product range consists of 28,000 lines. An MSI/SLIM stock recording system has brought about a number of benefits, including an improvement in service levels, doubling of branch stockturns, and the cutting of branch stocks by a third.

An overview of English aims, theoretical scope and methods is badly needed. Ministries throughout the English-speaking world have become dominated by a demand for testing – stimulated no doubt by regular Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) surveys – and lost sight of first principles. The purpose of this article is therefore to set out a model of English drawn from the best international experience since the 1960s, collected during seminars and practical workshops on four continents.

This paper uses a collection of experiences drawn from seminars and practical workshops over the past 50 years. It incorporates researches and reflections generated with the author’s former colleagues.

The paper gives an insider’s account of the carefully designed movement for English development and teacher participation that started during that decade in England, ramifying and attracting new energies in Canadian provinces, the USA, Australia and New Zealand. Founded in new theories of classroom communication and interaction, the emerging models also demonstrated the urgent need for new approaches to assessment, sampling students’ optimal achievements. The regime that is universally replacing this major work depends, it can be shown, on a model designed by ministers (disregarding professional advice) and avowedly intended to promote competition among pupils, teachers and schools – thus stifling the kinds of cooperation essential to any classroom, especially in the arts, and indeed to Education in general. But the historical foundations remain, from that creative period, and can be reclaimed.

This is an original view from an author who is one of the handful of survivors and who has been active in each stage since 1960, and has been privileged to be invited to four continents to convene seminars and practical workshops over many years.

The brief announcement that the Government had accepted that there should be regulations on open date marking of food, to come into effect in 1975, will come as no surprise. It is a timely reminder of what public pressure can achieve these days; how sustained advocacy and publicity by interested sectors of society—magistrates, local authorities, public health workers, consumer groups—can secure legislative changes which, in this case, run counter to trade opinions and the recommendation originally made by the Food Standards Committee that such a proposal was not practical and the existing law was an adequate protection. This was stated in the FSC Report on Food Labelling of 1964, although there was no indication of the evidence reviewed or that the subject had been considered very deeply; it was, after all, only a small fraction of the problem of food labelling control. It was also stated in this Report that in certain cases, date‐stamping of food could give to purchasers a false sense of security, “not justified by the conditions under which the food has been kept since manufacture”.

IN ANY TYPE OF LITERATURE it is easier in retrospect to pick out the notable writers of a period from the mass of lesser writers. With any type of current literature it is almost impossible to assess what will still be read or valued by later generations. This is as true of children's literature, and particularly of a more specific branch such as the family story, which tends to date rapidly. This is confirmed by the new book list for children, published by the Library Association: First Choice, which has been eagerly awaited. Praise should be generously lavished on the compilers, who have had to decide courageously which authors have to go overboard and have also had the arduous task of selecting a representative twenty‐one authors of family stories, approximately ten per cent of the list of fiction for older children.

WHEN delivering his Elbourne lecture Sir Geoffrey Vickers related the following incident. ‘As a very inexperienced subaltern in the old war, my company commander once said to me: “Vickers, the company will bathe this afternoon. Arrange.” In the Flemish hamlet where we were billeted the only bath of any kind was in the local nunnery. The nuns were charity itself but I couldn't ask them to bathe a hundred men. I reviewed other fluid‐containing objects which might be potential baths—cattle drinking troughs, empty beer barrels—and found practical or ethical objections to them all. At that point I had the misfortune to meet my company commander again and was forced to confess that I had not yet solved my problem. He was annoyed. “Whatever have you been doing all this time?” he said. Then, turning his own mind to the problem, apparently for the first time, he added: “Take the company limbers off their wheels, put the tilts inside and the cookers beside them for the hot water; four baths each four feet square, four men to a bath, do the whole job in an hour. Why don't you use your brains?”’

Aarhus Kommunes Biblioteker (Teknisk Bibliotek), Ingerslevs Plads 7, Aarhus, Denmark. Representative: V. NEDERGAARD PEDERSEN (Librarian).

Edith Margaret Robertson Ditmas — ‘E.D.’ to her staff and many colleagues, ‘Edith’ to her family and friends — was appointed General Secretary of Aslib in May 1933 in succession to Mr S. S. Bullock, and was redesignated Director in 1946. She retired from that post on 28 February 1950, being succeeded by Leslie Wilson. In June 1947 she took over the editorship of the Journal of Documentation with effect from the beginning of volume three, following the appointment of the founder editor, Theodore Besterman, as Counsellor, Bibliographical and Library Centre, Unesco. She continued this work until 1962. A note by Geoffrey Woledge in the June 1962 issue of the Journal informed readers that Miss Ditmas was being succeeded as Managing Editor by Miss Barbara Kyle ‘who has contributed to the Journal in the past and is now taking up a full‐time post on the Aslib staff’. It reminded readers that Aslib's establishment of the Editorial Board in 1947 had only been intended as a temporary measure (its membership in 1947 comprised F. C. Francis, D.J. Urquhart and G. Woledge) and with reference to Miss Ditmas continued: