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S0‐called external information services are not new but in recent years they have taken on new dimensions. Because no industrial information service can be self sufficient, it has always been necessary to draw on outside sources to obtain references, documents, data, information and advice that will augment what can be supplied using internal resources.

After boom days in the Industrial Revolution and 1920's West Cumberland hit hard times. Now this special development area looks for a much brighter future, with improved roads, new industrial estates and keen, reliable workers Report by Richard Brooks; photographs by Colin Porter.

INDUSTRY CAN ONLY benefit from the efforts of Airey Neave, chairman of the powerful all‐party Select Committee on science and technology. Neave was one of the first prisoners of war to escape from Colditz Castle. He strolled out dressed as a German officer. Now he is using his initiative to overcome a security problem of another kind—Whitehall's hidden secrets.

“Corporate planning” is the term which, perhaps more than any other, epitomises the adoption of business management techniques by the public sector. In Britain, with massive local government reorganisation in 1974, many librarians were forced to come to terms with such techniques whether they liked it or not. Of course, in its purest sense corporate planning applies to the combined operation of an entire organisation be it local authority, university, government department or industrial firm. However, in this paper I do not intend discussing “the grand design” whereby the library is merely a component part of a greater body. Rather, it is my intention to view the library as the corporate body. It is a perfectly possible and very useful exercise to apply the principles of corporate planning, and the management techniques involved, to the running of a library or group of libraries. Indeed, many librarians have already done this either independently or as their part in the corporate plan of their parent organisation.

In the money under review the meetings of the Group have been lively and well attended, with over twenty members present at many meetings. The following visitors and overseas members were welcomed at Group meetings:

NO MAN OF LETTERS has ever more closely identified himself with his country's historical lore and traditions than Sir Walter Scott: as poet and novelist his place in Scottish literature is secure. Abbotsford, the house he transformed into a replica of a medieval Scottish baronial castle, all turrets and gables, weapons and armour, is a national literary shrine. The memoirs of his life and work written by his son‐in‐law, John Gibson Lockhart, are widely acknowledged as a biographical tour de force. All this is well known and needs no emphasizing here. It is therefore all the more strange that the library he built at Abbotsford and the sizeable collection of books he amassed there have received very little attention in recent years. He has rarely been mentioned as one of the great book collectors, yet many of the books and broadsheets to be found in his library are now almost unprocurable elsewhere. A study of an eminent author's library always proves rewarding and the library at Abbotsford is no exception. Indeed, perhaps even more than usual, this particular library reflects the literary interests of its owner. Certainly, Scott's love of books very quickly emerges.

ALTHOUGH you are reading a professional journal, you may be interested in the impressions of a semi‐outsider, one who has teetered on the edge of the maelstrom of modern librarianship without actually having fallen in—yet. The experience may even be salutary; who knows?

PROPOSALS WHICH COULD have a devastating effect on the transport plans and costs of British industry are now being studied by the Environment Secretary.

SOCIAL responsibility is a phrase widely employed today. The mass media harps on it as much as it was prone to do about worker participation. Rarely, however, does anyone analyse it and explain in simple terms what it really means, whether it is desirable and how it can be achieved.

Professor W. Saunders: I have listened with very great interest to the proceedings of the last two and a half days and it seems that a picture has gradually built up during that time. We started with Mr. Arnold and Mr. Vickery setting the scene and an attempt by Mr Vickery to indicate some broad guidelines, and then we had what really amounts to a very important series of case studies from various points of view. We finished with snags and problems and a look at the manpower implications. And at the end of it all, I must say that I have a general impression that the state of this particular art that we are concerned with is not unlike that of our own discipline of information science, information studies, or at least what it was a year or two ago. As a professional educationalist I am concerned all the time that I'm attempting to teach library and information science with theoretical frameworks, with general principles. I am trying to find a framework, I am trying to find principles. What one does so often find is empirical evidence, ad hoc studies, and gradually one is conscious that all of these studies are becoming accommodated, becoming built in to some sort of emerg‐ing theoretical framework, not very hard yet, but on its way. And so it is, it seems to me, with this present problem, the problem which is the theme of this conference, except that we are still very much at the stage of ‘ad‐hoc‐ery’.