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Aslib has had a Research and Development Department since 1959. It has received powerful financial support from the Office for Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) and from industry, because it is recognized that a continuing department, accumulating experience, and working in close contact with operational services, is the most favourable environment for the advance of information science. Aslib's subscription income now contributes substantially to the support of the department. With the right pressure and the right encouragement from the Aslib membership, the department will continue to justify the support it receives.

When I began to consider this topic I was struck by the number of times I wrote the word ‘change’ in my preliminary notes, and change is really the theme or leitmotiv which runs throughout this paper. I shall look first at a number of issues which are changing the use of information and the nature of information work Those changes have implications for the future information workforce and for the education and training of that workforce. Next, I shall briefly describe the way in which the main providers of information education and training are themselves changing to meet the new demands. Specifically, I shall discuss developments within library and information schools, the provision of continuing education against the ever present backcloth of reduced budgets and inadequate funds, and finally I shall touch on the development of the New National Vocational Qualifications in library and information work.

The relationship between information provider and client is a crucial measure of effectiveness. In commerce the success of this relationship might be measured by market share or profitability, while in the non‐profit sector, where most libraries and information services (but not all) exist, the success might be measured by criteria such as document delivery and satisfaction. We speak of effectiveness, implying the extent to which the service can successfully impact upon and meet the needs of the users. Particularly if the model which management supports is a community‐based model (as opposed, say, to a stock‐holding model), then the relationship and interaction between service and user group lies at the heart of the matter.

Special libraries in science and technology constitute a vital link in the process of information transfer. A study of how special libraries in the UK are functioning at present is essential to any planning for a general improvement in their services and to heighten their contribution to the country's scientific and technological progress. This paper records the partial findings of a recent survey and is concerned with the identification and analysis of the essential elements of the framework within which special libraries work: such as, the nature of their management, major activity of the parent organization, subject‐specialization of the library's holding, documentation activity, staff‐structure, budget‐provision, size of library stock, and its growth rate, weeding‐out policy, etc. It brings out the wide variation in the behaviour pattern of special libraries in science and technology, belonging to different categories, e.g. libraries in private firms vis‐à‐vis government libraries, or basic research vis‐à‐vis applied research libraries. It also draws attention to areas of deficiency where action is needed.

Research in library and information service I take to be any systematic attempt to investigate problems and arrive at solutions. The problems can be small‐scale, e.g. the best way to file pamphlets; or large‐scale, e.g. the optimum distribution of reference libraries throughout the country. They can be specific to one institution, e.g. the best method of providing current awareness to Members of Parliament; or of general import, e.g. the economics of micro‐filming. They can be short‐term, e.g. a brief study and recommendations concerning a specific indexing job; or long‐term, e.g. a continually deepening exploration of the functions and structures of bibliographic records in all kinds of library situations. They can be very practical, e.g. redesigning the layout of a library; or very theoretical, e.g. developing a linear programming model for resource allocation.

The British Library has recently reviewed its role in the provision of short courses. Courses that the Library currently provides are described and future plans discussed. It will concentrate on two types of course a) user education and b) disseminating its special library/information knowledge and experience to others in the library/information field. Little is known about the need for user education amongst different classes and level of user. The Library will therefore develop initially a programme of courses which extends its experience and aims to discover the needs of a range of different users.

In 1966, the Government's Office for Scientific and Technical Information offered to increase its support for Aslib specifically to encourage it to build up a viable research department, to undertake systematic programmes of research into scientific and technical information systems, and to provide consultancy services in this field. In response to an appeal from Lord Kings Norton, then President of Aslib, some twenty member organizations agreed to share with OSTI the cost of this new development during its first three years. The three‐year development period ended in December 1969, and an account of the progress made during this period was published in Aslib Proceedings for May 1970.

My research over the last few years has been concerned with the use of automatically‐obtained keyword classifications for information retrieval. Such a classification can be described as a thesaurus, but those classifications which have been most successful in my experiments do not resemble the normal kind of manually‐constructed thesaurus, and the bases on which automatic and manual thesauri are constructed are quite different. Human beings explicitly consider the meanings of words in grouping them, but word meanings are not accessible to computers. Automatic word classification is therefore based on information about the distributional behaviour of words in documents, on the assumption that words which behave in similar ways in terms of document occurrences are semantically related. That is to say, groups of words which are based on the statistical associations of their members in documents should reflect their meaning relations, at least sufficiently for the purposes of retrieval.

The interest of the Aslib Research and Development Department in economic aspects of information service reaches back to the early days of the Department, under the leadership of Chris Hanson. I will be referring to a study of standard times made in 1961 by Margaret Slater and himself. He also undertook an investigation, which was unfortunately never published, on the cost of interlibrary borrowing. Our current interests spread over five areas are:

The next in the series of evening meetings arranged by the Aslib Research and Development Department, to be held at Aslib on Tuesday, 12th September 1972, is entitled ‘Data and the chemist’. The speakers from the Department will be Margaret Slater and Averil Osborn.