The readability of scientific papers has decreased dramatically in the past 100 years, but now appears to have bottomed out at the ' very difficult' level. Volume and price inflationary pressures on publishers have probably been responsible for other changes in journal characteristics between 1900 and 1970 such as increased printing density and number of words and characters per journal per year.

The characteristics of library and information science litera ture were investigated by sampling issues of LISA, ISA, RZI. BS and CCA for the year 1983. Single author documents predominate with 69% of the total. English (71%) and Journals (71%) are the dominant language and format. Currency has detenorated since earlier studies but literature coverage has increased. 1391 distinet journal titles were identi fied in the coverage of LISA, ISA, RZI and BS, but the overlap is very low with only 39 titles common to all four services. Most of the literature originated from North America (38%) and Western Europe (34%). 1545 journals were identified from Ulrich's Guides. The number of these 'surviving' journals exhibited exponential growth for the past 150 years. From this and other data the corpus of knowledge of library and information science is estimated as 5 x 105 documents.

The total number of UK information scientists with examined IS qualifications is estimated at 1300. Of these about two thirds trained at The City University. In a spectrum of jobs ranging from librarianship through IS to IT the proportion of non print information handled increases to 100% and is seen as an important differentiating characteristic for the three areas. The new part-time M.Sc. in Information Systems and Technology offered at The City University is envisaged as filling a gap between existing IS and IT courses.Education for information science started in January 1961 with evening courses organised by J. Farradane at the precursor of The City University (TCU). These were based on an Institute of Information Scientists' syllabus or set of criteria and led to the IIS Certificate [1]. Full time courses followed in 1964 and with the granting of a university Charter in 1966, TCU offered M.Sc. degrees from 1967. Since then, 465 M.Sc.s, over 200 part time Diplomas, and 22 research degrees have been awarded. By the end of the current year over 900 students will have been trained by TCU's Department of Information Science. This of course includes about 120 IIS Certificate students but excludes about 90 students who did not satisfactorily complete their course. Many former students are well known in the IIS, including Southern Branch

Information transfer among scientists can be regarded as analoguous to a complex rate process highly dependent on the characteristics of the information forms. A general model is presented and an attempt made to quantify certain pathways. Time values are presented for the major stages and certain transmission losses, arising from the condensation of information as it passes from primary to secondary sources, have been calculated. In particular the roles of theses, alerting services and reviews are discussed. A significant fraction of chemical information appears in a thesis before it is republished in a journal paper.

The principles underlying alerting services are discussed. General alerting services (as distinct from SDI systems) need to transfer to their users a large quantity of current but mainly irrelevant information as speedily as possible. As title indexes are the easiest to prepare, and are therefore common, the user needs to know how much significant information is not discernible from a documents title. This is estimated to be 20-25% but can vary with subject and type of infor-