Communication media (hereinafter called "media") are systematically compared on communicative capacity escaping from the effects of popular but vulgar impression for media. For this purpose "general item list for media comparison" has been created, which consists of 14 items about the mode of communicative manner and 4 items about the mode of message, bringing the total to 18 items. Then 21 media types are categorized by the 18 items in the general item list, in order to analyze the media environment in contemporary Japanese society. These categorical data are used for making the hierarchical classification with cluster analysis and for visualization in 2-dimensional space with non-metric multidimensional scaling method. These analyses allow us to understand methodically the positional relation and allocation of media, and it is found that the general item list is useful.

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The survey of life science researchers with institutions/companies on their use of electronic resources is reported in this article. The purpose of the survey consists two elements. On the one hand, whether the behavior patterns of researchers with institutions/companies and their perception of media are the same of them of researchers with universities were investigated. The other hand, we tried the evaluation of institution from the viewpoint of users' behaviour pattern and perception of the institution. In this article, two surveys of researchers with companies on their use of electronic resources are reported: one is the survey by mail (March to April, 2005), the other is internet survey (March, 2008). As the result of the survey, the researchers with institutions/companies use various media as research tools, but the rate of use of scholarly journal is higher than other media. Moreover, the evaluations of information acquirement by researchers are influenced by the situation of information use on their institution, especially whether professional librarians are in their libraries.

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This paper is a part of the study aiming to find out how the future of scientific and technological information (STI) policy should be in Japan, through the investigation on the implementation of past STI policy from the present perspective. As the first step to achieve the goal, this paper aims to clarify the transition of problem recognition on STI described in the government's fundamental policy papers relating to promotion of science and technology. Twelve policy papers published between 1960 and 2006 were investigated: the reports by the Council for Science and Technology dealing with overall subjects or STI, and the 1st to 3rd Science and Technology Basic Plans. In order to analyze these reports, I adopted a viewpoint sets named "essential components for STI dissemination" developed on the basis of the "STI transfer model" and specified which components are recognized as a problem in each report. The trends of problem recognition on STI appeared in the reports were sorted into three groups by the publication dates, and distinction between each group was explainable according to the progress of computerization in access to information or electronic information media.

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In this paper, the author considered the policy of cases with four local governments in Japan where the full-time teacher librarians (Sennin Shisho-kyou) were placed at public school from 1950s to 1960s, that is, Aichi Prefrecture, Kochi Prefecture, Tokyo Metropolitan, and Okinawa Prefecture (under the U.S. occupation). As the research methods, not only the literature study but also the interview for several informants were used. In each local governments, the diversity of the policy existed in the feature. In addition, except for elementary school and junior high school in Kochi Prefecture, the common feature which both the full-time teacher librarian and the school librarian were placed at the same school library. The Ministry of Education did not positively evaluate the original local policy as indicated from the case of Tokyo at that time. Moreover, the policy tended to hinder the formation of "collegiality" in teachers' groups at the school.

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