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Until quite recently librarians on the whole were ill‐equipped for being custodians of maps. Even now one fears this is less rarely the case than it ought to be. Hair‐raising stories of early maps in public libraries, wrongly dated, wrongly ascribed, completely unorganised, accounts of antique atlases deposited with love by nineteenth‐century aldermanic benefactors, unguarded, rebound in buckram bindings with ‘912’ stamped on their spines — these and other horror stories are still being swopped by bemused researchers who have had the fortune to stumble on them. What makes this sort of thing the more disturbing is that the number of maps — thanks to natural wear and tear and exports to American universities — is constantly diminishing. Decreasing numbers and increasing demand spells soaring prices. A copy of Horwood's 32 sheet map of London 1792–99 went for £3 at the Gardner sale in 1924. Today one would have to pay something in the region of £250 for the same map. Just on financial grounds alone then we have something of a moral duty to know about our map stocks.

‘CARTO‐BIBLIOGRAPHY’ must surely be just about the ugliest term in a cartographer's vocabulary, but to its inventor, Sir Henry George Fordham, it represented something of the very greatest significance, and it is as well for us that it did. It was in 1896 that Sir George made his decision to compile a catalogue of Hertfordshire maps, ‘little conscious’, he was later to confide, ‘of the amplitude such a work could assume’. Can there be anyone who has undertaken a carto‐bibliography since who has not echoed at some point Fordham's confession? Working alone, and without guidance from any similar previous compilations, he had no choice but to devise his own forms, methods, and arrangements, ‘digesting my materials’, as he put it, ‘according to the lights they seemed to throw upon the subject’. The resulting compilation, the first real British carto‐bibliography to see the light of day, began to appear in the Transactions of the Hertfordshire Natural History Society in October 1901. Six years later, in September 1907, it was completed and published in volume form as Hertfordshire maps: a descriptive catalogue of the maps of the county, 1579–1900. A supplement followed in 1914.

SUDDENLY, in these days of war‐waging against planners, developers, and demolition contractors, local history has come into its own. In almost any part of the country you care to name, local amenity societies are popping up to defend, conserve, preserve, and restore the little, if we are lucky, ‘they’ have still left us with. All of which is — or ought to be — very heartening for local history librarians.

RECENTLY I picked up a copy of NEW LIBRARY WORLD and browsed through it, detecting, or so I thought, a certain bias in its editorial approach towards the public librarian, and mentally discounted most of what I read until, emerging through the advertisements, I came to ‘The Shallow End’. Recognising yet another example of Parkinson's law (journalism expands to fill the space available) and style, I nevertheless, as they graphically say, ‘read on’. It was quickly borne in on me that the feelings expressed by the noxious Thrasher in the March and June issues were, with some modification and emendation, precisely what I uneasily felt in regard to the rôle of modern public library in this country. Both articles raise some very serious points and I thought I might expose some of my jaundiced qualms to the judicious discussion of others more nearly concerned.

I DID NOT, in fact, spend the second half of May prone under a pastis barrel in South Brittany, as I forecast in the last issue, but only because the stuff does not, apparently, come in barrels, but in comfortable‐sized bottles, and very nice too! I can report that the weather was exactly what I had always believed to be the norm in late Spring (ie recent British November fare), that the French, who are pretty awful really, would like us to stay in the Common Market because, although they think we have gone mad, it is only thanks to Britain that nazism was broken, and that if you listen to BBC Radio 4's 6 o'clock news while sitting placidly in the sunshine of a Breton evening, you rapidly realise that the French are quite right, and that the British have gone stark raving mad. Try it!

THE proposed new central library for Portsmouth, for which the foundation stone was laid by the Lord Mayor at the beginning of December, looks from its plans to be a satisfying building, of architectural interest, which incorporates admirably up‐to‐date ideas of reader service and staff needs.

THIS bibliography is an attempt at bringing together some of the current or most useful writings on women and employment in Britain, to facilitate much needed research and also as a practical aid to those actively involved in campaigning for women's equality in employment. Since it has been necessary to limit the scope of this piece of work, I have excluded material on women's work inside the home and on the situation in other countries. I have also tended to concentrate on current sources of information dealing with the general situation, disregarding the historical dimension and material on one occupation only.

Government and IT ‐ In spite of all the lip service paid by Government to making a business of information and encouraging increases in the amount of information available online, the Department of Trade is still indulging in foot dragging about online access to tradenames. Since 1979, tradenames have been held on computer and I was told in that year (NLW, November 1979) by the Department of Trade that an index to tradenames would be produced shortly and sold to libraries and others on COM‐fiche. Now two computer indexes are poised for the public market, but it seems the Department of Trade is once again playing a will we? won't we? game, because if the Department went online, the others might not bother. The first independent computer data base is with Datema Limited who have carried out very successful field trials with Laurence Tagg in Newcastle‐upon‐Tyne Business Library, as well as at Sheffield and the Science Reference Library; the second data base is with Compu‐Mark (UK) Limited in London.

Interviews ‐ We shall publish from time to time reports of interviews with librarians and others. We shall endeavour to feature librarians in different kinds of work (or none); we shall neither seek out nor avoid the well known, but hope to meet those whose work and view of it will demonstrate that variety which is a characteristic of library and information work.