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This purpose of this paper is to provide details of a project to involve people with dementia in reviewing pieces of work being undertaken by Alzheimer's Society staff. Service User Review Panels (SURPs) were developed as a way to orientate participation around the requirements of service users with dementia.

SURPs took account of the specific communication and other needs highlighted in the literature on involving people with dementia. The underlying principles of SURPs concerned the quality of the relationship between the facilitator and the participants, the process of consent, the types of communication used, and the establishment of ownership. These principles were evaluated using observation of meetings, focus groups with panel members, and semi structured interviews with participating staff.

During the pilot, SURPs fed into the work of the organisation in a number of ways including helping to set organisational priorities, and reviewing the content of tools, materials and policies. They also created increased opportunities for contact between staff and people with dementia. This paper details three examples that illustrate some of the processes involved, the issues that arose, and the learning that resulted. It concludes by outlining some of the factors of success and some of the limitations of SURPs.

These findings might be of use to researchers and practitioners wanting to involve people with dementia in their work or their organisation.

This paper argues that by shackling the future of work to a vision of full employment, alternative futures are closed off. At present, employment creation is seen as the sole route out of poverty. Here, however, we reveal that a complementary additional pathway is to help people to help themselves and each other. To show this, evidence from a survey of 400 households in deprived neighbourhoods of Southampton and Sheffield is reported. This reveals that besides creating job opportunities, measures that directly empower people to improve their circumstances could be a useful complementary initiative to combat social exclusion and open up new futures for work that are currently closed off.

It is now forty years since there appeared H. R. Plomer's first volume Dictionary of the booksellers and printers who were at work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1641 to 1667. This has been followed by additional Bibliographical Society publications covering similarly the years up to 1775. From the short sketches given in this series, indicating changes of imprint and type of work undertaken, scholars working with English books issued before the closing years of the eighteenth century have had great assistance in dating the undated and in determining the colour and calibre of any work before it is consulted.

THE Fifty‐First Conference of the Library Association takes place in the most modern type of British town. Blackpool is a typical growth of the past fifty years or so, rising from the greater value placed upon the recreations of the people in recent decades. It has the name of the pleasure city of the north, a huge caravansary into which the large industrial cities empty themselves at the holiday seasons. But Blackpool is more than that; it is a town with a vibrating local life of its own; it has its intellectual side even if the casual visitor does not always see it as readily as he does the attractions of the front. A week can be spent profitably there even by the mere intellectualist.