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Discusses alternative methods of providing a public library service to one‐house stop clients of south Lincolnshire’s mobile libraries. A literature review revealed a lack of up‐to‐date cost information for alternative methods of service provision. Four methods were selected for further investigation: books by mail; village shop libraries; extending the housebound service; and transporting clients to the library. Annual cost and cost per issue were calculated and compared to the cost of the mobile library. Staff and users were also surveyed for their opinions of the current service and the alternative methods proposed. The results of the costing exercises showed that transporting users to the library was the most cost effective method but this was not popular with the current users of the service. Services considering replacing the one‐house stop mobile service will also need to consider issues including social inclusion, best value and the public library standards.

AS FAIRLY WARNED to you earlier this year would transpire, what you are now reading is the 100th issue of NEW LIBRARY WORLD, a span of issues which has encompassed some 8½ years, several million words, a sizeable copse of trees to produce the paper on which those issues have been printed.

This paper aims to explore the introduction of a new experience‐based learning process in the learning and teaching of human resource development (HRD) within a professionally accredited curriculum in a UK University.

An action enquiry approach is taken, and qualitative data gathered over a full academic year from tutors and students are analysed to examine how those involved made sense of and learned about HRD.

Influences on the experience of an innovative HRD pedagogy are identified as: assessment processes and expectations; relationships and behaviours within the learning and teaching process; the experienced emotions of those involved; and the extent to which students feel clarity about what is expected.

The qualitative nature of the data and the focus on one particular UK institutional taught module limits the generalisability; in particular, the experience of full‐time students or those involved in courses that focus exclusively on HRD outside of UK are not incorporated.

Attention to assessment processes is an essential pre‐requisite to any pedagogic innovation, as is effective and transparent team‐working by tutors and careful thought about tutor behaviours in settings where experienced emotions and relationships directly affect the innovative process.

The inherent tension between the constructivist and exploratory HRD curriculum and the requirement for “performative clarity” in HRD pedagogy is explored. Experienced emotions and relationships are shown to mediate a student‐centred and critically reflexive HRD pedagogy, something that is currently insufficiently recognised in much of the literature.

OUR readers, to whom we offer New Year greetings, may, we think, face the coming year with as complete a confidence as that which has sustained them in the very difficult years through which they have recently passed. Not that it will be an easy year, because the demand for retrenchment in public expenditure is as insistent as ever, and the March estimates will serve as a debating ground of the fiercest sort. Nevertheless, a change has come over much of public opinion in regard to public libraries; the Press no longer ignores them, and, if much that is written about them is ill‐informed, there is now a disposition to discuss their improvement rather than to condemn them. We are justified in believing that the library has now made its place secure, and the initations and evasions shown in the recalcitrant borough of Marylebone are merely one evidence that places without libraries are uncomfortable in their consciousness of the fact.

Reports from the south‐east of England that housewives have been purchasing packets of “ glitter ” consisting of powdered glass, lacquered, coated with silver and sometimes dyed, for the purpose of decorating their cakes makes one wonder seriously whether we Britons are any more of a thinking race than our coloured brethren of London and other large centres, who report has it, consume large quantities of canned cat and dog meat as a sandwich spread. In the first case, although the so‐called “ glitter ” was never prepared for use as a cake decoration, the manufacturers concerned have given an assurance that in future packets will be labelled that the contents are not for eating !