SIGNPOSTS: SOME SELECTIONS FROM The 1956 SPECIAL LIBRARY LITERATURE Available to Purchase

This series of annual reviews of the literature of special librarianship, which now reaches its fifth year, has been designed to help those most in need of the body of professional experience contained in the literature. Those special librarians or information officers with little or no professional training, who work in small departments far away from more experienced colleagues, have only the recorded knowledge in the literature to help them, but, because of lack of experience, they are often unable to sift from the mass of articles of varying value and character which crowd the pages of the professional journals the comparatively few items likely to be of practical use to them. For their benefit we present a selection of those papers really likely to give them solid help, leaving aside all purely theoretical and polemical articles, however important, and all literature on large libraries, unless they are likely to have applications in smaller ones. To these we add a selection of reference books likely to be of professional use to anyone in information work, including a number which he may wish to know about, even though he does not have them in his own library. The list is not restricted to work published in 1956, but is intended rather to be representative of items received in British libraries during that year. With the growing volume of library literature, the choice of a hundred or so items is bound to be in some respects a personal one, with which many may disagree, especially over the omissions, but it is hoped that all the items included will be of positive value.