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The main objective of the present study is to explore whether there are variations in the employment of evaluative language resources by male and female writers. More specifically, the study focuses on variations, if any, that can be attributed to difference in gender.

The study compared and contrasted forty recommendation letters written by male academics to the same number of letters written by female recommenders. The study uses both quantitative and qualitative approaches.

The investigation of three attitudinal resources in letters of recommendations showed that the most employed resource was the judgment sub-system. The appreciation domain was in the second position, and the least frequent was the affect. The results also revealed no statistically significant variations in attitude sub-systems: Affect and appreciation as the writers in both groups (males and females) employed almost the same options in each. In respect with judgment, however, the analysis explored significant differences between the two sets as male academics used more judgment resources than females.

The main contributions of this study may be as follows: first, it is one of very few studies drawing on the attitude-category of appraisal system, as an analytical tool to examine gender differences in recommendation letters very particularly on the ones written by non-native speakers of English. Second, the gender factor is central in the genre of the recommendation letters and hence researchers should be cognizant of its role as certain variations might be impacted by it. Third, the lists of tokens can be offered as heuristics for academics to have most common words or phrases to use in their letters. Finally, the findings can hopefully bear some important pedagogical implications, very specifically for novice and non-native academic writers of recommendations letters.

Sentiment analysis and emotion processing are attracting increasing interest in many fields. Computer and information scientists are developing automated methods for sentiment analysis of online text. Most of the studies have focused on identifying sentiment polarity or orientation – whether a document, usually a product or movie review, carries a positive or negative sentiment. It is time for researchers to address more sophisticated kinds of sentiment analysis. This paper aims to evaluate a particular linguistic framework called appraisal theory for adoption in manual as well as automatic sentiment analysis of news text.

The appraisal theory is applied to the analysis of a sample of political news articles reporting on Iraq and the economic policies of George W. Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to assess its utility and to identify challenges in adopting this framework.

The framework was useful in uncovering various aspects of sentiment that should be useful for researchers, such as the appraisers and object of appraisal, bias of the appraisers and the author, type of attitude and manner of expressing the sentiment. Problems encountered include difficulty in identifying appraisal phrases and attitude categories because of the subtlety of expression in political news articles, lack of treatment of tense and timeframe, lack of a typology of emotions, and need to identify different types of behaviours (political, verbal and material actions) that reflect sentiment.

The study has identified future directions for research in automated sentiment analysis as well as sentiment analysis of online news text. It has also demonstrated how sentiment analysis of news text can be carried out.

My purpose is to draw the attention of the information profession to the fact that the majority of British companies have totally inadequate access to information, to outline the role information brokers can play in alleviating the situation, and to stimulate discussion. In view of the overall theme of the conference, the economics of information, it is probably time that due attention was paid to the problems of what is almost an information ‘third world’, because of the possible adverse effect on the economy of the United Kingdom if it continues to go unnoticed. The size of the problem is substantial; on the British industrial scene, the professional information population is dwarfed by the actual number of companies.

Second Leslie Patrick Memorial Lecture presented in Birmingham on 8th November 1919 at a meeting jointly organized by Aslib Midlands Branch, the Birmingham Metallurgical Association, and the College of Librarianship Wales. The role of the British Non‐Ferrous Metals Research Association, the Zinc Development Association and related bodies in the development of non‐ferrous information in Britain from the 1920s to the present day is viewed in relation to the information staff involved and the abstracting services provided. Future developments applicable to this field are viewdata services and video‐disc storage, and their potential is considered.

Several online host services in both the USA and Europe offer companies the opportunity of being able to load and access private files of information. The benefits associated with private file services are outlined, and some of the factors which need to be considered when contemplating the use of such a service are discussed, including file design, charges and security. The use of videotex for private files is also discussed.

Tuesday 13th December 1977 was a cold, damp day in London, but the staff of the registration desk at the Tara Hotel soon got warmed up as over 400 delegates from twenty‐four countries arrived to collect their preprints volumes and attendance lists.

In ten years' time the CD‐ROM version of the Oxford English dictionary may well contain a number of entries for ‘online’, one of them being:

When the conference organizer first approached me some months ago and persuaded me to deliver this paper, the title—initially ‘Cuts in Special Libraries’—rapidly crystallised to ‘Cuts and the Special Library’. This happened because I decided that I must cover the two aspects, namely public sector cuts which will impinge on special libraries and cuts in the provision of resources in the special library itself. I came to this conclusion since I see the two as interacting, as well as stemming from the same general economic climate in this Country; hence both aspects will affect most, if not all, of us who work in special libraries.

Results of an in‐depth study of the electronic publishing (EP) industry, with particular emphasis on the consumer marketplace, are presented. EP was defined as the use of electronic media to deliver information to users in electronic form or from electronic sources. EP is contrasted to electronic‐aided publishing, which is the use of electronic means to format and produce a conventional information product. An “information chain” model of the information flows between publishers (or producers) and users was helpful in understanding the boundaries of EP and defining its markets. Following a review of the conventional publishing industry, a model of the forces driving the EP industry was derived. Although technology is the strongest driving force, it is by no means the only one; the others are economics, demographics, social trends, government policies, applications growth, and industry trends. Each of these forces is described in detail in a “cause and effect” scenario, from which keys to success in the EP marketplace are derived. Although there is some turmoil in the industry, with new services continuing to appear and disappear, the overall picture is one of optimism. EP should be a significant part of consumers' lives by the end of the decade.