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Perhaps the marvel is that there should exist at all a department in a British official body at national level dedicated to the support of research into information needs and the problems of providing and operating library and information services. That it does exist may be regarded as the product of a typically British combination of conscious decision‐making and historical accident.

In LIBRARY REVIEW, Autumn, 1952, Mr. A. R. Hewitt considered the illegality of fines for overdue books. The present writer examines recent trends in respect of fines and other charges, with emphasis mainly on questions of principle rather than of law.

PHILIP WHITEMAN, Head of the Library Organization Department, The College of Librarianship, Wales, will visit West Germany in February 1973 at the request of the British Council. He will visit libraries and give lectures in library schools throughout the country, but particularly in Berlin, Cologne and Munich.

A number of fundamental values for the library profession are identified and discussed, specifically: a respect for the physical forms of recorded knowledge; the steady building of useful collections; the tradition of personal service in libraries; and their cultural and social roles. Recent trends and policies which threaten these values are examined and two areas are considered (the Library Association and the library and information science schools) in which action might serve to challenge these threats.

A while ago The Observer newspaper ran a six week long superquiz, winners to take a trip on the Orient Express. The clues were myriad, infernal and drawn from all disciplines. In a mad moment I wrote them a letter, which they published, pointing out the reverberations that such competitions have in libraries. No bad thing to publicise the fact that when memory and home reference books fail people resort to us. The letter seemed to strike a chord with many, including NLW who asked for an enlargement on the theme.

Faced with the annual torrent of library reports, one longs for more shooting and less mumbling, and perhaps at the end of the season, one agrees with Macbeth. Stanley Snaith has written that “the theory and technique of annual reports is a subject which has been rather neglected in our professional literature” and that “no substantial contribution to the subject has appeared in this country.” The most recent American writings on the subject are Robert D. Franklin's articles in Library Review.

THE London & Home Counties Branch of the la reports a gratifying response to its attempts last year to attract a wider list of applications for its biennial Senior Librarians Award, worth £800. As a result, a proportion of the 1973 award has been allotted to Ivan G Sparkes, Librarian of High Wycombe, Bucks, for research into source material relating to furniture history, and to Celia F Thimann, a lecturer at Ealing (London) school of librarianship for a visit to Japan in the autumn to study library provision and information systems in the field of ecological conservation and pollution.

The history of research in library science is not the easiest of subjects to speak on with any hope of presenting significant interpretations and conclusions, because as a topic of interest to the whole profession, in Britain at least, research in our field is a very new one, with the main developments of significance crowded into the last ten or fifteen years—it is as yet far too early to form a historical perspective. True we can review and catalogue a good many facts about research activity, and note certain milestones, but it is not possible, and will not be possible for another decade or two, to assess in a valid way, the significance of all this activity in terms of professional practice.

THE Manchester School of Librarianship was founded in October 1946, one of the original five schools opened in the autumn of that year. It was attached to the Department of Industrial Administration in the Manchester College of Science and Technology and was thus something of an exception, as the majority of schools of librarianship were attached to Colleges of Commerce or general Colleges of Further Education. As accommodation was very limited in this rapidly expanding college, the then City Librarian of Manchester, Charles Nowell, kindly offered the use of two rooms in the Central Library, so after a brief period in the College building, the students were moved to the Central Library, though the School remained administratively a part of the College. Many former students must have memories of those two curving rooms, the Manchester Room and the Lancashire Room, with their old‐fashioned school desks.

THE proposition that British library schools should examine their own students is not a new one. As long ago as 1954, Roy Stokes put the question bluntly to the profession. In those days his was a voice crying in the wilderness. The profession at large was not ready for such a development, and continued to adhere to its long held view that the Library Association should examine the products of the schools, while the schools confined themselves to teaching.