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1. Anderson, T. W., Das Gupta, S. & Styan, G. P. H. A Bibliography of Multivariate Statistical Analysis.

THE FUNCTION OF THE REFERENCE LIBRARIAN is to conduct requests for knowledge to known or to possible sources. He can sometimes do this by turning with arm‐length familiarity to a bay full of familiar friends —B.N.B., Besterman, Walford, Britannica, Willings ‐ and an increasing number and variety of bibliographical aids to specialized fields in current literature, but a request for wide, intensive and retrospective book coverage of a subject can set him dancing for a whole afternoon.

WILLIAM DAVIES has been appointed City Librarian of Bradford in succession to Mr H Bilton, who is retiring. Bill Davies is presently Deputy City Librarian of Hull, having previously served in Stockton on Tees, Wellingborough North Riding County and Teesside Public Libraries. He is an ‘old boy’ of the Newcastle School of Librarianship and was President of the AAL in 1971.

A question of size THE Committee set up by the Minister of Education in 1957 to “consider the structure of the public library service in England and Wales, and to advise what changes, if any, should be made n the administrative arrangements, regard being had to the relation of public libraries to other libraries,” was the first such since the Kenyon Committee which reported in 1927. One of the most controversial aspects of the Roberts Committee's deliberations was the consideration of the minimum size (in terms of population) of an independent library system.

THE ACCUMULATED MASS OF RAILWAY LITERATURE in the form of books, periodicals, papers to learned Institutions, Parliamentary papers, and so on, has grown to gigantic proportions in recent years, and today as our own British railway system is shrinking the volume of that literature is increasing in inverse proportion to the shrinkage. That is only reasonable because much of the history of railways, not only of this country but of the world, has not yet been adequately documented, and if the railway is, as well it might, almost wholly surpassed by road and air transport, the omission must be repaired as soon as possible, if only to leave for posterity a record of a phase in the life of Man: and it must be done before any more valuable material is disposed of as salvage.

UNTIL 1952 Queen's University was fortunate to have one main library building. With the establishment of the Institute of Clinical Science in the hospital area 1½ miles from the main university site, the formation of a separate medical library near the hospitals was considered essential.

In the periods, following the First and Second World Wars, colonial states across the British empire underwent waves of reforms that were geared toward improving human well-being, from enhancing social conditions, such as health and education, to expanding opportunities for economic and political engagement. The literature on the colonial state typically traces these state-building efforts to the agency of European colonial officials. However, evidence from a historical analysis of Trinidad and Tobago reveals a different agent driving state reform: the colonized. A local labor movement during colonialism forced the colonial state to construct a number of state agencies to ameliorate the economic, political, and social conditions in the colony, thereby resulting in an increase in state capacity. This study, therefore, provides critical intervention into the colonial state literature by showing that the agency of the colonized, as opposed to just the colonizers, is key to state-building, and specifying the mechanisms by which the subaltern constrained colonial officials and forced them to enact policies that improved colonial state capacity.

THE College of Librarianship is best considered on its own terms, as an institution unique in the history and present pattern of British library education, but its significance and probable future development can best be assessed if two external factors are kept in mind.

With this number the Library Review enters on its ninth year, and we send greetings to readers at home and abroad. Though the magazine was started just about the time when the depression struck the world, its success was immediate, and we are glad to say that its circulation has increased steadily every year. This is an eminently satisfactory claim to be able to make considering the times through which we have passed.