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Analyses the applications received by the Winston Churchill Trust for the “Disaster” category in the 1992 Travelling Fellowship Competition. A total of 232 valid and viable applications was received from police (60), fire (48), ambulance (24), medical interests (18), emergency planning officers (15) and miscellaneous (67) groups. Each group is analysed for age, sex, location, proposed research interest, and destination. The applications revealed extensive interest in the wide range of problems now known to exist in the field of natural and man‐made hazards and disasters. The Trustees selected 12 applications for the award of a Travelling Fellowship.

HASTINGS is now a memory of a conference in which the members of the L.A. heard papers of singular merit and one or two addresses of marked distinction. If we were to select the Presidential Address of Mr. C. B. Oldman, the beautiful Annual Lecture by Mr. Bowen Thomas and the quite remarkable performance in English of Mr. Bengt Hjelmqvist, on the organization of his native Swedish libraries, as the highlights of the general sessions, and Nigel Balchin's model after‐dinner speech as another, we are not the less aware of the excellence of nearly all the papers submitted at every session; indeed, there was not really a bad paper throughout, although some were much too long. They averaged forty‐five minutes. Possibly the Conference Committee set this length; if so, we suggest respectfully that however long the written paper may be the time should be reduced by at least one third for which the audience is required to listen. One felt in several cases that even the authors of the papers grew weary, or were under a sense of hurry, before they reached the end. This was occasionally caused by extempore insertions, a most difficult performance in which few succeed. Fortunate is the reader who addresses a morning session; he escapes the afternoon somnolence.

Providing specialized services to a specific population requires assessment and identification procedures to avoid providing services to those who are ineligible to receive them as well as ensuring that eligible individuals are provided the services intended for them. Education of the gifted is such a specialized service, and so, assessment procedures are necessary for this population. Special educational programs are not an entitlement for individuals who are gifted as they are for individuals with disabilities. Consequently, operational definitions and procedures vary widely across states and even across school divisions within states. Therefore, the present paper summarizes characteristics that are considered to be early markers of giftedness and discusses some of the ways that they can be assessed. Problems in assessment (e.g., ceiling effects on norm-referenced measures, and difficulties in assessing creative aspects of performance) are also discussed. In the absence of consistent definitions and formal measures that are able to tap aspects of the definition with reliability and validity, assessment and identification of individuals who are gifted is likely to remain an impressionistic task in which individuals are compared to poorly defined prototypes of what it means to be gifted.

IF no completely novel contribution to librarianship came out of the Eastbourne Conference, it could be justified as having to some extent integrated libraries and literature; for, in the choice of a scholar to address it in Dr. R. W. Moore on the underlying connexion of books and therefore libraries with life; and of our own ex‐President, Dr. Esdaile, to recreate the poetry of the first years of the century, no mistake was made. The technical and administrative matters always seem Ezekiel's valley of dry bones in such a setting, but there were really good papers, practical ones like the very controversial contribution of Mr. Corbett, the excellent hospital library paper by Miss Southerden and Mr. Lamb's experienced treatment of Commercial and Technical Libraries. Most members there, too, were old enough to appreciate the chronicle of 1919–49 offered by Mr. Stewart, and all received stimulation from Mr. L. R. McColvin's forecast of our future. There were too many papers for any one librarian to absorb, but the Library Association serves many interests today. Some impressions have been given in other pages from the writer of Letters on Our Affairs.

While some libraries have done their best over the years to inform the public as to what they are doing and can do as regards helping readers, others seem to move along without making any special effort to publicise their facilities. In the old days modesty was a virtue, but now it is its own reward. Government departments, which used to shun the limelight, now employ public relations officers in large numbers, and professional bodies and big business houses constantly seek publicity. Times have changed, and the battle is to the strong; and it is unfortunately generally felt that the institution or service that does not speak for itself has little to speak about. It may frankly be said that if a service is in a position to enlarge its sphere of influence and esteem it should do so to the utmost of its endeavour. But it will be granted that if its publicity is not justified by performance, there will likely be an unhappy reaction.

WE commence a volume of THE LIBRARY WORLD in circumstances which seem more cheerful for libraries than was expected when 1953 began. The community has survived the largest increase in local rates that has been imposed for many years with almost equanimity and libraries have not suffered appreciably in their budgets, although many of them suffered cuts which twenty years ago might have been disastrous. So far as library development is concerned we see a few signs that the bleak period of library building may become less rigid. We read of a development scheme of the spread‐over sort for the Surrey County Library that will cost £440,000 approximately. There have been a few libraries restored by the grants of the War Damage Commission; and of these the National Central Library reconstruction which cost over £90,000 is perhaps the chief example. Smaller but quite substantial signs are the new modular branch library, the first of its kind in England, the Manor Branch, Sheffield. This is alleged to be our largest branch library; if this is so, it is larger than the Leith Library at Edinburgh. Anyway, all public librarians will congratulate themselves on having an example in being of the modern flexible plan which must obviously influence the future. Librarians are not always masters of the building situation; they may have to accommodate themselves to town‐planners, local architects, ambitious ward councillors who have a natural desire for a “fine” building for the use of their immediate electors. So they may when the time comes have forced upon them buildings suitable for the hour but of such outer architectural permanence that they cannot be scrapped for a century. A succession of completely adaptable temporary buildings, which need not be expensive or inartistic, is what modern library service seems to demand. As a well‐known librarian asked of a famous architect: “Give us large linear and cubic space, well warmed, lighted and ventilated and no fixed divisions of the apartments in it.” The modular system, as in the Sheffield example alone seems to fulfil this condition at present. Further happy signs are the news that £9,000 is to be spent on improving Fulham Central Library, and the opening of departments such as two children's libraries at Hampstead and temporary branches as at Hull.

The study looks at the characteristics of upswings and downswings for UK housing cycles. Specifically, the purpose of this paper is to empirically analyse cycles in house prices and housing affordability on the characteristics of persistence, magnitude and severity.

The paper draws upon the triangular methodology of cycles and utilises housing data from the last three decades.

From an empirical perspective, the study obtained four main results. First, the graphical trajectory of cycles in house price and housing affordability is highly synchronized. Second, upturns in both cycles tend to be longer than downturns on average. Third, the recent upturn in house prices and housing affordability is characterised by larger duration, magnitude and severity than the earlier case. Fourth, the latest downturn in both cycles is highly synchronised in terms of time occurrence, persistence, magnitude and severity; in addition, in both cases, the latest downturn is considerably smaller than the previous one. The study additionally indicates that on average the length of a complete house price and housing affordability cycle is 19 years on a peak-to-peak basis.

This paper is essentially exploratory and raises a number of questions for further investigation. Future research should, first, arrive at a more nuanced definition of affordability and, second, examine causality. The fact that two phenomena appear to have some significant synchronicity is not an indication that they are interdependent, although logic would suggest they might be.

This is among the few papers that analyses cycles in UK house prices. It is the first study that draws attention to the housing affordability cycle and the first to compare cycles in house prices with cycles in housing affordability.

IT is seldom that I can bring myself to write anything for publication, and as I had a longish article on “The education of librarians in Great Britain” printed as recently as 1964 in the Lucknow Librarian (which is edited by my friend Mr. R. P. Hingorani) I had not contemplated any further effort for some time to come. But as THE LIBRARY WORLD evidently wishes to cover all the British schools of librarianship it would be a pity for Brighton to be left out, even though, coming as it does towards the end of a gruelling series, I can see little prospect of this contribution being read. Perhaps, therefore, I need not apologise for the fact that, as my own life and fortunes have been (and still are) inextricably bound up with those of the Brighton school, any account which I write of the school is bound to be a very personal one.