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Following his company's acquisition of Data‐Star, Pat Tierney, CEO of Dialog, talks to Paul Blake about how he sees both services, and the information indus‐try as a whole, developing. We also have the viewpoints of Peter Martin, Stuart Urwin and Martin Buerger, Dialog's new Vice President of European Operations.

OVER TWO hundred City of London librarians attended a debate earlier this month on the subject of information monopolies. There was some lively discussion between the three panellists — Fred Perkins, Group Director of Electronic Publishing at the FT, Dan Wagner of MAID and Melanie Goody, Library and Information Manager at KPMG Peat Marwick — on whether today's hosts are equipped to meet user needs, not just today but in the years to come. Paul Blake gives this account.

Debate at last month's National Online Meeting in New York included discussion on how the delivery of news information is set to change, how best to use the Internet for research, and fresh approaches to teaching students the intricacies of online searching. Paul Blake gives this account.

The race is on to develop systems which will allow the multilingual interrogation of data‐bases, with the European Commission making this a central theme of the ECU 64 million IMPACT2 programme. But what is out there already and how does it work? Much of this article by Information World Review's Reporter, Paul Blake, is devoted to the latest entrant on the multilingual scene, the MenUSE system developed at the University of Huddersfield in the UK. Originally built to provide assisted menu‐driven access to Medline and INSPEC, a Japanese‐English version searching INSPEC on Data‐Star made its debut this summer, and an English‐Danish‐French prototype is schedule to appear by the end of the year.

As CD‐ROM becomes more and more a standard reference and technical support tool in all types of libraries, the annual review of this technology published in Computers in Libraries magazine increases in size and scope. This year, author Susan L. Adkins has prepared this exceptionally useful bibliography which she has cross‐referenced with a subject index.

Our news compiler of the last three and a half years, Paul Blake, is no longer able to take on this task following his promotion to Editor of our sister publication Information World Review. Their gain is our loss. One result of this move is a slightly different format to the News Roundup: we continue to give the main stories of the last two months, following which stories are given by overall subject rather than by vendor.

The sale of Data‐Star. This month's news roundup is dominated by the 1 March announcement that Dialog's parent, Knight‐Ridder, has acquired the SWISS host Data‐Star. Earlier in this issue of Online & CDROM Review, you can read my interview with Dialog's President and other senior personnel involved.

Stakes are raised in online market This month's news roundup is dominated by a series of announcements which raise the stakes significantly in the online consumer market, as well as having potential ramifications in the professional market.

Reed buys MDC and maps out European plans … European expansion is a key element in the acquisition of Mead Data Central by Reed Elsevier, according to MDC's President, Rod Everhart. A name change is also in the works, as is the loading of Reed Elsevier databases.

FT unveils its shot at the end‐user market. Online/CD‐ROM Information 94 saw a host of new products and it is difficult to pick out the main highlights. For me, however, there was no contest for the slickest and most user‐friendly product unveiled: FT Discovery. This is a point‐and‐click online service offering end‐users a combination of news, company and country information, along‐side graphing tools. A launch is pencilled in for the middle of the year.