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The need for social information has six dimensions: function (why do people need information?); form (what kind of information do people need?); clusters (what do people need information about?); agents (who initiates the information activity?); users (how do needs differ between different groups of people?) and mechanisms (which mechanisms can be used to meet information needs?). These dimensions provide the basis for a model that can be used to analyse social information needs and the ways in which they are met.

Advances in the domestication and selective breeding of Australian Black Tiger shrimp, Penaeus monodon, opens the opportunity for world producers to reconsider the benefits of farming this species. Just over a decade ago this species was the world's most farmed shrimp species, however, difficulty in its domestication, in part, led to the widespread establishment of Penaeus vannamei (Pacific White shrimp) as the most farmed shrimp species in the world. This study empirically evaluates the productivity benefits of commercially domesticating P. monodon against production from wild broodstock of the same species. The evaluation compared the relative production from commercial ponds stocked with the progeny of wild P. monodon broodstock and ponds stocked with the progeny of domesticated stocks. The production data were from 164 ponds of domesticated stocks and 30 ponds of wild stocks, collected over 4 years (2009–2013) from two separate farm sites of the same Australian shrimp farming company. The wild stocks were sourced from the east coast of Australia. The results suggested that the productivity of the selectively bred stocks was 39% greater compared with production from wild stocks given equivalent amounts of feed and other inputs. Furthermore, productivity was additionally enhanced depending on the choice of feeds and whether stocking took place in September rather than later in the year (i.e. in early spring rather than late spring/early summer in the Southern hemisphere). This suggests that there is significant potential to further enhance the productivity of P. monodon farms via integrating advances in domestication, feeds and management practices.

As the rate of growth in the established market for information specialists declines, increasing attention is focused on the emerging employment market. A survey based on job advertisements suggests that in the UK this emerging market offers between 3000 and 3500 jobs at any one time which potentially are open to librarians and information workers The characteristics of these jobs are described and discussed and the results are reported of a survey which set out to discover: what were the expectations of employers, what sort of people were getting the jobs, and what impact were librarians and information workers making on the emerging employment market The results suggest that, while the market as a whole may expand, librarians and information workers will face severe competition. The research was funded by the British Library.A recent study of the established market for librarians and information workers (1) shows that, after a period of sustained growth in the 1960s and early 1970s, the rate of growth has slowed considerably to the extent that it is unrealistic to expect much expansion of the established market during Rthe coming years. Perhaps because of this, increasing attention has been focused on the potential scope for employment offered by the emerging markets for librarians and information workers.The effects can be seen most clearly in the degree of urgency with which British schools of librarianship and information studies are attempting to revise their curricula in an attempt to produce graduates who will be able to compete for places in this emerging market. The process of rapid curriculum change is endorsed by the report of the Transbinary Group set up to investigate the education and training process for librarians (2).To justify this attempt to move into a new employment market a number of people have cited research evidence which seems to suggest that we are moving into an 'Information Age', or at least a society in which information figures more significantly than it has in the past. A recent study carried out by the Technical Change Centre, for example, suggests that in NICK MOORE is a partner m Acumen, a research and information consultancy. Until 1982 he was the project ofhcer responsible for pubhc hbrary research at the British Library

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