This paper summarizes the findings of a recent survey of user reactions to the abstracting services produced by The Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux (CAB). The study was carried out by the Aslib Research & Consultancy Division and funded entirely by the Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux.

I remember an occasion a few years ago when I needed some advice on questionnaire design and a colleague suggested that I get in touch with the Centre for Research on User Studies at Sheffield University. ‘But of course’, I replied, quick as a flash, not wishing to betray the fact that I had...

The aim of this short paper is to draw attention to the growing importance of online retrieval of non‐bibliographic information, and to summarize the salient features of what are commonly referred to as databanks.

As you may well have guessed from the title of this paper I intend to concentrate today on the thinking or rationale behind library promotion. I make no apologies for the fact that my approach will be in the main theoretical because it seems to me that there is little point in discussing the...

Evaluation is a term which crops up with increasing regularity in the professional literature of our field. The term is easy to understand, but it does have a wide variety of applications. Evaluation studies can range from full‐blown assessments of international information systems and...

I should like to begin with an analogy, which was used originally by Alan Gilchrist in a paper on cost‐effectiveness some years ago. The analogy is repeated almost verbatim because it says precisely what I want to say, better than I could have said it myself.

Though I have had little contact with the medical library profession, I do know that your group (Medical, Health and Welfare Libraries) is highly active and highly thought of throughout the profession. From my point of view, however, the grouping of three really quite different professional...

The effects of economic recession on the nationwide provision and development of library and information services has been the dominant theme for professional discussion and debate in the UK for the past decade. It would be wrong to suggest that policy makers, practitioners and researchers, any...

This article is based on a presentation given at ICI's Company Information System Managers' Annual Conference, April 1983.

This article is based on a study commissioned by the British Library Research & Development Department to consider the feasibility of setting up a national distance learning scheme for information and library studies in the United Kingdom. It reviews recent developments internationally in the...