What knowledge and skills are supervisors and administrators in university and college libraries seeking in academic librarians? Where do they think such knowledge and skills should be acquired ?
These and a number of other questions were asked in a survey conducted in October 1989. From the 1,467 questionnaires mailed, 939 responses were received. In the questionnnire, academic library supervisors and administrators were asked to rate thirty-nine knowledge bases according to the degree to which these knowledge bases were required of academic librarians.
This paper provides a profile of the 939 respondents and a summary of the analysis on the ranking of thirty-nine knowlegde bases.
FinaIIy, directions for further research and discussion are identified.

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As a part of a comprehensive study of reference services, the authors try to build a theoretical and structural model of reference services in academic libraries, and to compare it with the actual conditions in Japan. The purpose of building such a model is to show expressively the internal structures of the duties (components) of reference services, and to propose standards for the design and the management of efficient and effective services.
The supposed components (e.g., answering reference questions, building a reference collection, compiling bibiliographic tools, etc.) were chosen and enumerated from the related documents (e.g., guidelines for reference services, handbooks of library and information science, and papers in the field). They were analysed and classified from the point of interrelationship and priority in cost effectiveness, and were put into the stratified structure.
As for the type of libraries for the model building, the main libraries of Japanese universities were chosen, because the authors had already surveyed them by means of questionnaires and had data on the actual conditions of their reference services. Using the data, the relevance of the model to the actual conditions was tested statistically, especially by chi-square test. Findings of these analysis are presented in a series of tables and figures.
As a result, it was proved that the model represented generally the actual states of the reference services in Japan. At the same time, some problems in the actual services have been disclosed.

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NPAC was a program established under the Higher Education Act of 1965, Title II-C, under which the Library of Congress acquired, insofar as possible, all publications worldwide which are of value to scholarship, cataloged them promptly, and distributed their bibliographic records through printed catalog or other means. This program is also known as the Shared Cataloging Program. Shared Cataloging, however, originally meant only the cataloging phase of this highly integrated program.
This paper deals with the various aspects of NPAC and can be used as a self-contained guide on NPAC. How NPAC was implemented, developed, and discontinued is described on the basis of abundant literature. Especially the background of NPAC's implementation and its actual circumstances are discussed in detail.
There has appeared until now much literature mentioning NPAC's positive aspects (for example, it has influenced ISBDs and is compared to UBC as a prototype). This paper, in addition to this, introduces NPAC's negative aspects.
Finally the following points, which have barely been touched upon in the relevant Japanese literature, arw made clear:
1. Shared Cataloging techniques were invented by John W. Cronin.
2. Shared Cataloging was ended in 1982.

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Facing a radical change of the industrial structure (containing high informatisation), our society is often said to enter on a new phase—life-long learning society. As for public libraries, how do they cope with these circumstances ?—their installation rate, functions, staffs and so on.
In order to deal with this problem, we resort to a revaluation of public composite facilities, revealing on the one hand their histricity and status quo, criticizing on the other a preceding research undertaken by Nihon Toshokan Kyokai in 1981, and then we will offer some proposals on them and their staffs.

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