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In 1936, when H. G. Wells presented his proposal for a ‘World Encyclopaedia’ to the Royal Institution, an action‐oriented response commensurate with the magnitude of his idea did not ensue. ‘It is a super university I am thinking of, a world brain; no less’, he said. The speech was printed in an obscure book titled World Brain, which is now out of print and hardly ever cited or discussed where it should be.

The problem of determining the optimal cross‐reference structure for a given index and for a given community of users is discussed. A cross‐reference structure is represented as a graph in which the nodes are index terms and the links are relations between index terms. In order to clarify the concept of ‘level of cross‐referencing’ the characteristics of cross‐reference structures are studied. Some measures of cross‐reference distributions are suggested as a means of comparing the cross‐referencing levels of subject indexes. Types of relations linking the terms of cross‐references in existing indexes and thesauri are examined. The implications of the study for the construction and testing of indexes and thesauri are discussed.

Authors of scientific articles often read a paper that fails to cite their prior work when they feel it should have. A survey of university faculty shows the extent to which such opinions abound. If justified, they reflect non‐use of bibliographic search methods, their inadequacy or non‐scholarly use of the result. Principles for the design of a new kind of automated or semi‐automated document retrieval system are formulated. They are analysed and shown likely to improve the scholarly quality of scientific work as represented by the bibliographies in manuscripts reporting that work.

Patterns of searching in library catalogues were analysed, using the data from a large survey of the use of three university library and one public library catalogues. ‘Known‐item’ searches were the object of the study. Success or failure of the search was correlated to degree of correctness and completeness of the searcher's information about title and author of the item that he wished to locate. Factors involved in searching strategies were discussed. The double role played by both the title and the author as a way of access to the catalogue and as a means for identifying the right entry was examined.

Many scholarly articles acknowledge input from colleagues, mentors and trusted assessors. This study explores the social function and cognitive significance of acknowledgements. A six category typology was developed and applied to 444 acknowledgements which were carried by research articles in JASIS (1970–1990). It is proposed that acknowledgements and citations should be used conjointly in the assessment of research performance and in disciplinary exegesis.

There are many phenomena in information science which, when quantified, yield variants of the hyperbolic frequency distribution and are characterized by long straggling tails. Conventional statistical sampling theory offers no general techniques for the confident analysis of finite discrete distributions of this kind. A sampling theorem, based on the binomial probability distribution, but otherwise distribution‐free, is derived and some of its applications are illustrated numerically. One application answers Kendall's question: How many additional periodicals would be found on doubling the period of publication within which periodicals contributing to a specified topic are enumerated? The effects of sampling truncated distributions are also briefly discussed.

Knowledge Industry, ASIS team up to produce database user service. Knowledge Industry Publications Inc., and the American Society for Information Science (ASIS) have joined forces to create a four‐faceted Database User Service. The new service will provide an annual print directory, an online directory, a monthly newsletter, and a database hotline.

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Tenn. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.

According to Sasha Alyson, collections development librarians have a responsibility to provide books that address the needs of the estimated 10 percent of the population who are homosexual. Several authors have discussed the important role that libraries can play in the lives of gays and lesbians (see for example, Alyson, 1984; Ashby, 1987; Parkinson, 1987; and Monroe, 1989). Because they afford a degree of privacy to users, libraries that house good collections are a desirable place for gays and lesbians to sift through their positive and negative images and, in so doing, find solace and hope.

Roberts makes an important point in his note when he draws attention to the limitations of databases both in terms of their coverage of the literature and their retrieval capabilities. These limitations will have two effects on their potential use for creating new knowledge: first, some ‘undiscovered public knowledge’ (to use Swanson's term for apparently novel inferences that could be drawn by making connections between facts that are separated in the existing literature) will escape our notice and second, some of the inferences that are made will turn out not to be new after all since they will have already been suggested in the literature that was not retrieved or not covered by the databases.