II PERIODICALS IN INFORMATION WORK Available to Purchase

Scientific and technical periodicals are read soon after publication by individuals, for their own enlightenment. In addition to these ‘personal’ users, periodicals have what I shall call ‘institutional’ users—librarians, information officers, abstractors—who use them, maybe years after publication, mainly on behalf of others. These ‘institutional’ users find that for their purposes, which are slightly different from those of the ‘personal’ users, many periodicals are inconvenient to use in some, mostly minor, respects. My purpose is to ask editors and publishers to help ‘institutional’ readers by adopting a number of small changes, few of which would involve appreciable cost and none of which would lessen the value of their publications to ‘personal’ readers. They have been asked before—notably by Dr. V. E. Parke and Mr. L. G. Patrick in their papers at the 1947 annual Aslib Conference, and by Dr. Wilfrid Bonser many years earlier. I am, to a large extent, merely repeating and emphasizing their pleas. The requests I have to make may appear trivial: so they are. That is why it seems absurd that some, at least, should not have been adopted before now, and that it should still be necessary to put them forward.