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Aims to describes how UK bakery Bells of Lazonby teamed up with a housing association to create more affordable housing in its local community.

Uses information from the company's managing director, who chairs the Cumbria Rural Enterprise Agency and is working to increase the number of affordable homes in the countryside as part of an initiative headed by the Prince of Wales.

Reveals how the initiative – which is not limited to Bells of Lazonby employees, but also covers potential owners either working in the village, with children attending the village primary school, or originally born in the village – has helped young people and those on lower incomes to settle in the area.

Through achieving a better balance between housing availability and the demand for housing, Bells of Lazonby benefits directly and indirectly from the retention of local talent and a local workforce that helps to create a productive “buzz” in the workplace.

Describes an innovative solution to a significant HR problem.

Performance feedback about whether responses are correct or incorrect provides valuable information to help guide learning. Although feedback itself has no extrinsic value, it can produce subjective feelings similar to “rewards” and “punishments.” Therefore, feedback can play both an informative and a motivational role. Over the past decade, researchers have identified a neural circuit that processes reward value and promotes reinforcement learning, involving target regions of dopaminergic input (e.g., striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex). Importantly, this circuit is engaged by performance feedback even in the absence of reward. Recent research suggests that feedback-related brain activity can be modulated by motivational context, such as whether feedback reflects goal achievement, whether learners are oriented toward the informative versus evaluative aspect of feedback, and whether individual learners are motivated to perform well relative to their peers. This body of research suggests that the brain responds flexibly to feedback, based on the learner’s goals.

When we reach June in normal years we are expectant of some definite particulars of the Annual Meeting of the Library Association. The place of meeting is usually known from the year previously, and an outline of the prospective proceedings has been circulated. This year, we are given to understand, there is to be a meeting, although it will be briefer than usual, no public hospitality will be asked or expected, and it will be held at some place which is not a great town or city, so that we may escape the possibility of such hospitality being offered. In these circumstances there can hardly be any objection to a meeting, and we can see many advantages in it. If a place in Derbyshire, in Wales, or in some other district where there is beautiful scenery, can be selected, we hope that it will be, so that librarians, who many of them greatly need a brief holiday, may be able to include the Annual Meeting in their holiday programme. We shall await more particulars with interest, and we hope that they may not be long delayed.

The President of the Board of Agriculture has introduced in the House of Commons his long‐promised Bill for preventing the sale of butter containing large amounts of water, and the proposed measure appears to have been received with general approval on both sides of the House.

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

ELSEWHERE in this number we list libraries which have Esent us copies of their annual reports which we are glad to have. Now and again we are able to elaborate on these, but in the present issue that has not been possible. We would say, however, that these reports are deserving of the attention of librarians generally, and of students at the library schools. They are records of work in progress, and they do suggest the development of library policy. The best of them are of textbook value.

MY reaction to being appointed Director of Library Services would be one of frank amazement, rather as if I had been a commercial traveller in a rather dubious line of trade, such as ladies' underwear, who had suddenly been offered a bishopric. The recovery from this amazement would take about ten seconds flat and I would doubtless find myself in the thick of finding an office, a desk, a rubber plant and a regulation‐size piece of carpet appropriate to my grade. My first real task would be to bring some order to the seven sections of the D.E.S. now dealing with library matters and to initiate among librarians generally some radical thinking on the problems that face us all.

Gore supports IT Will the next Vice President of the United States push information technology to the forefront of America's domestic policy? It may well happen because Al Gore has played a leading role in the Senate as Chairman of the Sub‐committee on Science, Technology and Space and as a leading member of a group of Democratic Senators that believe investment in IT is one way out of the country's current economic doldrums.

THE occasional moving of stock in open‐shelf libraries creates a sense of novelty in the reader. We experienced this recently in entering a library familiar to us where we found the Literature section had been moved and reduced in order to make space for the increase in the Applied Arts class. Further the librarian declared that there was no excessive demand for much of modern poetry, but although the library has the poems of T. S. Eliot in several copies, none was on the shelves or at the moment available. One wonders if poetry that is “modern” has been read by the majority in the past half‐century; it is an art form, often lacking substance and therefore caviare to the ordinary reader. The poets of today with such exceptions as Walter de la Mare and Alfred Noyes, neither of whom is young, have not increased their chances by their deliberate or unconscious obscurity. Even the said‐to‐be most influential of the modern, T. S. Eliot, in such a work as Ash Wednesday, topical this month of course, is completely unintelligible, in spite of the almost divine music of some of its lines, to many quite intelligent and habitual readers. Our librarian declared that readers remain for Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning and even for Longfellow, in short for the real classics. This conclusion is borne out by the examination of a day's borrowings a year ago at Manchester. “Modern poetry,” its Report tells us, “seems to be departing from the range of the general reader into some esoteric mystery of its own,” and while the older classics, Browning, Chaucer, Donne and Tennyson were borrowed to the extent of four copies each, other poets were less in demand. Altogether 21 works of individual poets and 16 anthologies went out that day. A small array but, if continued through the year, it meant 11,100 works which are not a negligible number.