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The importance of mental health promotion is increasingly being recognised as a policy issue in the UK, although little is known yet about progress towards implementing mental health promotion approaches within mental health services. This paper presents an overview of the topic, and reports on a survey of local authorities in England to identify examples of good practice in mental health promotion and the extent to which they are underpinned by evidence.

This chapter focuses on the actors who engage in policymaking to offer alternative understandings of informality and the context in which this occurs. Using ethnographic vignettes from Canada and Australia as illustrations, theoretical and methodological goals are pursued through adopting the anthropological concept of ‘traces’ to show how informality both mediates and transcends across non-fixed physical, temporal and conceptual boundaries. With an underlying premise that normative understandings of informality are shaped by the policymaking ‘black box’ metaphor and a lack of access to policymaking spaces and actors, this chapter argues against the association of informality with illegitimate and invisible policy processes. Instead, experience of the policy process gained through professional and ethnographic engagement, or an ‘insider’ perspective, shifts the researcher’s gaze beyond physical barriers or separations to show that ‘traces’ formed through in|formal encounters create opportunities for relationality through which policy is conceived, deliberated and, in part, created.

This chapter documents the process of conducting research as an anthropological expert witness to provide evidentiary proof of a well-founded fear of persecution on account of “race” among Chinese Indonesian asylum seekers in the United States. The research employed detailed oral history interviews supplemented by ethnographic information on names, kinship terminologies, and rituals honoring the dead to reconcile the dilemma of verifying cultural identity without essentializing Chinese culture. It also employed the theory of racialization to account for persecution based on “race” according to the 1951 Refugee Convention while recognizing the social science convention of viewing “race” as socially constructed.

The long‐awaited regulations to provide statutory compositional requirements for the ever‐increasing range of meat products have at last arrived; presented in the form of a triology—The Canned Meat Product Regulations, The Meat Pie and Sausage Roll Regulations and The Sausage and Other Meat Product Regulations—all of which apply to England and Wales only; presumably the Scottish counterparts, modified for the geographical variations in commodities, will appear in due course. The Meat Pie and Sausage Roll Regulations come into operation on May 31 1968; the other two on May 31 1969.

OWING to the comparatively early date in the year of the Library Association Conference, this number of THE LIBRARY WORLD is published so that it may be in the hands of our readers before it begins. The official programme is not in the hands of members at the time we write, but the circumstances are such this year that delay has been inevitable. We have dwelt already on the good fortune we enjoy in going to the beautiful West‐Country Spa. At this time of year it is at its best, and, if the weather is more genial than this weather‐chequered year gives us reason to expect, the Conference should be memorable on that account alone. The Conference has always been the focus of library friendships, and this idea, now that the Association is so large, should be developed. To be a member is to be one of a freemasonry of librarians, pledged to help and forward the work of one another. It is not in the conference rooms alone, where we listen, not always completely awake, to papers not always eloquent or cleverly read, that we gain most, although no one would discount these; it is in the hotels and boarding houses and restaurants, over dinner tables and in the easy chairs of the lounges, that we draw out really useful business information. In short, shop is the subject‐matter of conference conversation, and only misanthropic curmudgeons think otherwise.

THE L.A. Conference can be said to have finished off the summer, albeit somewhat ingloriously. Frankly it was not a very inspiring affair. However the papers and atmosphere are well described in this number by Mr. Jack Dove and in this column we will confine ourself to that excitement‐packed Annual General Meeting which now probably holds the world record for the shortest A.G.M. of a serious professional institution. The opportunity to express an opinion or ask a question on any aspect of the affairs of the library profession comes only once a year, but the only persons who spoke at the Annual General Meeting were the Chairman, the proposer of the Hon. Auditors, the Mayor of somewhere inviting the Association to hold the Conference there next year and a mover of a vote of thanks to something or other. It makes you wonder. After all the past year has not been entirely without interest to librarians. There are some, we know, who are heartily sick of the sound of the word Roberts but is there no one sufficiently moved to express an opinion on the recommendations contained in the report of the Roberts Committee? It is simply astounding that there was not one motion on the agenda on any aspect of that report. At the time that the agenda was prepared, it was not known that there would be a general election immediately after the conference but surely it is important that the profession as a whole should manifest its view of the recommendations of the committee so that the government could prepare legislation which would have our support. Only one of the major political parties has announced in its manifesto to the electorate that legislation will be introduced in a new Parliament to improve the public library service but of course no details of its proposals have been given. We must know that there is no end to the possible stupidities which could be incorporated into an Act—unless all the bodies concerned impress on the Minister the confirmed opinion of their members. The Association of Municipal Corporations and the County Councils Association have not been slow in making their views known. The Library Association Council presented evidence to the Committee which enjoyed (sic) the support of the membership but it cannot be said that the recommendations have the same support. But does anybody care? Apparently not. We shall grumble when new legislation is presented and then spend the rest of our lives blaming “them”. Is it any wonder that in the words of a London Town Clerk, “librarianship is a depressed profession”? Which leads us nicely to that other apparently unimportant event of the past year.

“Another important feature of contemporary government is the process of legislating after formulating proposals, consultation with interested parties and dealing with contra proposals, etc. Whilst this is, in princple, an admirable way of effecting the best possible compromise, it has in certain cases made for difficulty in the end. The implementation of proposals for any reform cannot be left too long, for belated legislation can be caught up in social changes that will bedevil any Bills that the government might eventually put forward. The government must be decisive in exercising its function of government and it is possible that the difficulty, for example, experienced with the Shops Bill, introduced into the House of Lords late in 1956, and now withdrawn, is a perfect example.”—(From the annual report of the Chief Inspector of Weights and Measures for Plymouth, Mr. R. Billings.)

The Regulations prescribing minimum meat content of a wide variety of meat products, for which we have been patiently waiting several years, will soon be with us and merge with the broad current of legislation controlling the quality of food. Even the plebeian sausage, living in sin all these years, may soon be legitimately wedded to a respectable meat content. It is interesting to note that the Food Standards Committee reported on sausages as long ago as 1956. Canned Meat and Meat Pies were reported on in 1962 and 1963 respectively and the Government's new proposals for regulations for these take into account the comments of interested parties. The present proposals lay down minimum standards of meat content for meat pies, uncooked meat pies, Scottish pies and meat and vegetable pies; for all types of canned meat except those which make clear that meat is not the major ingredient; and for all sausages, including frankfurters, liver sausage and black puddings, for meat with cereal and meat with jelly products; and in each class of meat product there are labelling and advertising provisions. So, at long last, it would seem that the unflagging efforts of all those engaged in food administration, especially the work of the Food Standards Committee, have borne fruit.