This paper describes the feature of the campaigns to fight against some proposed cuts concerning the public library service which occurred in Camden in London in 1988. The survey was based on the newspaper articles in those days. The protesters had many methods of campaigns against the curtailment plans. They are as follows: 1) a strike by library staffs, 2) a signature-collecting of a large number of people, 3) a lot of letters of the protest, 4) a read-in at the library by the famous actor and actress, 5) a protest rally, 6) a sit-in by protesters in the library, 7) a contribution to the libraries. Although two branch libraries were scheduled to be closed, the closure of the one branch library was avoided due to the strong support by the citizen. There were three reference libraries, of which two were narrowly escaped to close, only to be degraded to branch libraries. The other remains as it was. When we look at the total opening hours from the historical view point, the total opening hours a week were 790.5 hours by 14 libraries in 1984. However, in 1993 they decreased to 414 hours by 13 libraries. In 2003 it recovered to 514 hours eventually.

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In this paper, the issues lying over the headings of Author-name authority file of NACSIS-CAT are pointed out by analyzing the feature of Korean author name and its description on the publications. Because of the diverse of interpretation of the rules of selecting headings caused by exceptions provided in the rules, some probabilities to omit the result of retrieval still remain even the retrieval is done by any measure; retrieved by Hankul, Chinese character, Kana character or alphabet. The problem is how we apply the Author-name authority file to the retrieval system of bibliography. Resolving this issue, two types of description of the Author-name heading can be proposed as standards. They should be written such as "Chinese character+its pronunciation by Kana character+Hankul pronunciation divided by a word" or "Hankul pronunciation divided by a word" only. Furthermore, analyzing the peculiarities of author profiles which appear on Korean publications, our investigations to find out what items shall be required to identify author names resulted to point out the effectiveness of the informations of degree, present position and alma mater.

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In order to assess the present state and characteristics of reference service in leading public libraries in Japan, the author made a comparison between two surveys which were conducted in Shiga prefecture and Tama area in Tokyo. It emerges from the comparison that answering reference questions is the principal activity in reference service among the libraries in both areas and most libraries surveyed do not actively provide indirect services. It also emerges that there are such differences between these two areas as making reference resources by themselves, location of the reference collection in a library, design of reference desks, preparation of staff manuals for reference service, statistics of reference transactions, recording of reference questions and transaction process, and training for reference service. Moreover, reference service is not perceived as an important part of library work when compared with other services, such as circulation.

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