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The November evening meeting will be held on Thursday 26th November, on ‘The dissemination of published information to the executives of a major steel group’. The speaker will be Mr Richard Hindson, ALA Information Officer, Colvilles Limited. The Chair will be taken by Mr Julian Blackwell of Blackwell's, Oxford. Mr Hindson will illustrate from his experience in the iron and steel industry how free interchange of information can be achieved within an industry. An increasing number of companies are raising the calibre of their executives by management development and training schemes, but as far as the speaker is aware no group other than Colvilles is evolving a scheme which ensures that, once managers and specialists are appointed to particular posts, they are kept informed of developments relative to these posts. Mr Hindson will describe the information service that has been set up on these lines by the Colville Group of Companies.

I think that it would be sensible for me to begin this presentation with a declaration of my interest in the Universal Decimal Classification. I first became acquainted with the Classification over twenty‐five years ago while I was a student at the Loughborough School of Librarianship. Subsequently I utilized the Classification in various technical college libraries and libraries and information services in the engineering and steel industries. Eventually I was responsible for the conception, development and implementation of a computer based integrated information handling system for the steel industry. I described this system, as it was at the time, in a paper I presented at the Fifth Cranfield International Conference on Mechanized Information Storage and Retrieval Systems in 1975.

Until recently the writer participated actively in the application and development of the Universal Decimal Classification, principally by means of computer‐based techniques available via large ICL 1900 series installations. During the decade 1968–1978 a multi‐purpose database was developed and operated using remote computer resources equipped with extensive telecommunication facilities. Primarily designed to support senior managers, the subject coverage of the system encompasses all matters judged to be useful in the particular business environment concerned. One feature of the system is the use of the UDC for both information (reference) retrieval and profile matching. It is hoped that some personal reflections arising from the experience gained and on associated matters will be useful to those involved in the management of information in large organizations.

All items listed may be borrowed from the Aslib Library, except those marked, which may be consulted in the Library.

Two of the first questions I was asked to decide when preparing this paper were these: did I want to use visual aids (they asked the BBC); and what did I want to call it. A letter the Association sent to the BBC said this about the first: ‘The main purpose of using visual aids is to communicate information more effectively than is possible by speech alone.’ From that day on, we have hidden the letter from our colleagues in BBC Radio. And I want to speak on behalf of them, as well as Television.

Shortly after the war, The Iron and Steel Institute was able, through the Occupying Power, to assist the Verein Deutscher Eisenhttenleute, a body in Germany kindred in some ways to itself, to recover and reassemble its library, which had been dispersed for safety towards the end of the fighting. This operation was carried out by Mr Headlam‐Morley, the Secretary, and Professor G. Wesley Austin; the operation was of such importance that they both received, for the purpose, the equivalent rank of brigadier. I was then operating in BIOS with the equivalent rank of captain, and do not think that the two brigadiers and I ever met at the time; we have met frequently since.

Evidence of the link between major sports events and increased participation at grassroots level is somewhat mixed. The purpose of this paper is to examine attitudinal changes to sport participation among spectators associated with seven sports events held in Great Britain in 2014.

Primary data were gathered from 4,590 spectators aged 16 and over who attended one of the events. Both positive (inspiration) effects and negative (discouragement) effects were considered through the lens of the transtheoretical model (TTM).

The evidence from this research indicates that event audiences belong primarily to the latter (more active) stages of the TTM. It was also found that attending sports events can further fuel the existing desire of contemplators to increase participation, whereas the catalytic effect among pre-contemplators is arguably less potent. Virtually no discouragement effects were observed across the different TTM stages.

The research stops short of measuring actual changes in sport participation post-event of individuals in the different TTM stages and any attribution of such behaviour changes to events. This is both a limitation of the current research and a natural direction for future research.

The main implications for promoting sport participation through the medium of sports events include attracting more people in the early stages of the TTM, greater collaboration between different event stakeholders and the building of sport participation strategies into the event planning phase.

Models of behaviour change such as the TTM have seldom been applied to document the current and/or planned sport participation behaviour of individuals in a sport event context or to examine attitudinal changes towards sport as a result of attending an event. An adapted version of the TTM has been proposed to overcome the limitations of the traditional model.

The Institute of Public Relations defines the practice of public relations as ‘the deliberate, planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain mutual understanding between an organization and its public’. Although this definition is clear and concise and its implications are readily understood by people active in the field, it does not really make clear that public relations is primarily concerned with people as individuals. In any kind of social activity or investigation it is very tempting to divide people into groups. Group identification is a useful preliminary to further activity and research. Such identification is certainly useful to an industrial information service since the clientele is divided into groups almost automatically by the reason of their function, e.g. accountants, engineers, executives, managers, metallurgists, research scientists, technologists and so on.

News has reached us of the death on 19th August of Hans Peter Luhn, President of the American Documentation Institute since October 1963. Born in Barmen, Germany, in 1896, Mr Luhn went to the United States in 1924. He joined IBM in 1941 and worked there until 1961, when he retired and became a consultant to industry. Although Mr Luhn was known by relatively few people in Britain, his contributions in the field of mechanization are widely known. During his time at IBM Mr Luhn was at the source of a steady stream of innovations in the field of information retrieval. Among the projects he initiated, or developed, are: Keyword‐In‐Context Indexes, automatic abstracting, statistical methods of automatic indexing and selective dissemination of information. He was a prolific writer and some of his publications are already classics. Mr Luhn will be remembered as one of the great pioneers in library automation.

Aslib Council have received with regret the resignation of Mr George H. Davison on his retirement from The United Steel Companies Ltd in June 1964. Mr Davison is well known to members for his indefatigable services to information work in general, and in particular to the Aslib Northern Branch, of which he has been an officer since its inauguration and in recent years its Chairman. His professional writing has been prolific. He has served on several Aslib committees, and on Council since 1959.