In library service for the visually impaired, the central institution, which provides services all over the country by cooperating with the other institutions concerned, plays an important role as do libraries, which provide services directly. The purpose of this paper is to clarify the process and background of the formation and features of the Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille. For the study, the historical development of the library, the reports of the advisory committees and the basic ideology of social welfare are considered. As a result, the following points were found. 1)Volunteers founded the Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille. It became the Library of the Association of the Visually Impaired later. Parts of library services were covered by statefunds. The library was transferred to the State. The library is a national library of talking books and braille under the control of the Ministry of Education. 2)The following plans of the advisory committees were carried out: (1)the extension of the user groups of talking books, (2)the transfer of the library to the State, (3)the production and circulation of talking books to be shared between the libraries. 3)The ideas and system of social welfare have a big effect upon library service for the visually impaired.

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The bibliometric phenomena often produce highly skewed distributions where most of the items (e.g.articles)are"concentrated"in a small population of sources(e.g.authors), while the remaining items are spread out over the rest of the population. Many measures for measuring "concentration"have been proposed, nevertheless the notion of concentration is not clear. In this paper I would like to review the notion of concentration from the two viewpoints, i.e., absolute concentration and relative concentration. Linking the two viewpoints with the geometric expression of the Lorenz curve, I analyze the characteristics of concentration measures through the simulations using the geometric expression.

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This paper investigates the installation of book detection systems (BDS) in central municipal libraries in Japan and the rate of lost books in these libraries. The effect of BDS is also evaluated by measuring cost reduction through decreasing the rate of lost books. It was found that the installation of BDS in all sampled libraries was less than 10%, while it was more than 40% among libraries with relatively new buildings constructed since 1995. Two thirds of these BDS cover limited areas where valuable library materials are kept. While the rate of lost books during the survey were found to be 1.33% in general, it was significantly lower in libraries with BDS covering all areas in library. Further, in terms of the cost measurement, BDS with limited coverage is found to be less effective than the BDS with full coverage. Lastly, based on the simulation of the survey data, it was found that 25% of municipal libraries consider the installation of BDS as cost-effective.

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