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This paper reports on the successful introduction of a sophisticated online catalogue system at the library of the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge, using the Muscat program package. The system provides to both end‐users and library staff a choice between boolean searching on keywords and access using relevance feedback based on free text in English, mixed with UDC classification numbers. The system is implemented on an IBM 3084 computer. Significant benefits from the application of relevance feedback are reported with 10,000 records on file.

IN 1946 there was in the British Isles a clear image of librarianship in most librarians' minds. The image depended on a librarian's professional environment which was of the widest possible range, not less in variation than the organisations, institutes or types of community which required library services. Generalisations are like cocoanuts but they provide for the quickest precipitation of variant definitions, after the stones have been thrown at them. A generalisation might claim that, in 1946, public librarians had in mind an image of a librarian as organiser plus technical specialist or literary critic or book selector; that university and institute librarians projected themselves as scholars of any subject with a special environmental responsibility; that librarians in industry regarded themselves as something less than but as supplementing the capacity of a subject specialist (normally a scientist). Other minor separable categories existed with as many shades of meaning between the three generalised definitions, while librarians of national libraries were too few to be subject to easy generalisation.