Humans influence the frequency and spatial pattern of fire and contribute to altered fire regimes, but fuel loading is often the only factor considered when planning management activities to reduce fire hazard. Understanding both the human and biophysical landscape characteristics that explain how fire patterns vary should help to identify where fire is most likely to threaten values at risk. We used human and biophysical explanatory variables to model and map the spatial patterns of both fire ignitions and fire frequency in the Santa Monica Mountains, a human-dominated southern California landscape. Most fires in the study area are caused by humans, and our results showed that fire ignition patterns were strongly influenced by human variables. In particular, ignitions were most likely to occur close to roads, trails, and housing development but were also related to vegetation type. In contrast, biophysical variables related to climate and terrain (January temperature, transformed aspect, elevation, and slope) explained most of the variation in fire frequency. Although most ignitions occur close to human infrastructure, fires were more likely to spread when located farther from urban development. How far fires spread was ultimately related to biophysical variables, and the largest fires in southern California occurred as a function of wind speed, topography, and vegetation type. Overlaying predictive maps of fire ignitions and fire frequency may be useful for identifying high-risk areas that can be targeted for fire management actions.

This paper discusses the area of the question—its generation, its relation to the retrieval system, and its effect on the inquirer. Four levels of question formation may be isolated and analysed: the actual, but unexpressed, need for information; the conscious within‐brain description of the need; the formal statement of the question; and the question as presented to the information system. Input and output characteristics of systems are examined for their effect on the inquirer's decision to ask a question and on the form the query takes. Investigation of six parameters governing question type and ambiguity argues that we may be placing too much emphasis on syntactic matching of inquiry and store of answers. The inquirer's state of readiness is defined as the “state of mind” which allows a selection to be made from a series of messages. A question is seen as an indication of inadequacy on the part of the inquirer who hopes to remedy that inadequacy by calling on the information system. A major objective of information systems is to make commonplace the point of maximum usefulness where three coordinates cross: level of question, state of readiness, and available answer.

Seekers of information in libraries either go through a librarian intermediary or they help themselves. When they go through librarians they must develop their questions through four levels of need, referred to here as the visceral, conscious, formalized, and compromised needs. In his pre-search interview with an information-seeker the reference librarian attempts to help him arrive at an understanding of his "compromised" need by determining: (1) the subject of his interest; (2) his motivation; (3) his personal characteristics; (4) the relationship of the inquiry to file organization; and (5) anticipated answers. The author contends that research is needed into the techniques of conducting this negotiation between the user and the reference librarian. Delbruck's Principle of Limited SloppinessYou should be sloppy enough so that the unexpected happens, yet not so sloppy that you cannot figure out what happens after it has happened.-in Eiduson, Bernice T. Scientists: Their Psychological World (1962), p. 126.he major problem facing libraries, and similar information systems, is how to proceed from "things as they are now" to "things as they may be." It is an illuminating exercise to extrapolate from present technology to describe the library of the future. However, such exercises have little to say as to how to proceed from "now" to "then." 1 There are two possible alternatives to this process of change, with a whole range of options.2 First the revolutionary concept: libraries will wither away and their place in the communications network will be taken by some new institutional form, probably imposed from the outside. The second one, an evolutionary development, is that libraries themselves will gradually make the transition.The work described here is based on the second alternative. The objective was to examine and analyze certain relationships between library system and library user. It is hoped that this paper develops sufficiently fruitful generalizations, so that further investigations can start at a different level, with new assumptions. It is further hoped that, as a result of future investigations in this area, the evolution of libraries from passive warehouses to dynamic communication centers will be less traumatic and more effective.doi:10.5860/crl.76.3.251 College & Research Libraries 75th Anniversary IssueThis paper is not concerned with the usual library automation, although the effect that automation may have on the interface between user and system is recognized. In time, the automation of routine processes, i.e., order, catalog, and circulation control, after the bugs are worked out, will allow a different level of interaction. But routine automation is merely an extension of the control and warehousing functions of libraries. The work described here is an early effort to understand better the communications functions of libraries and similar types of information centers, because this is what libraries are all about.Consequently this paper is concerned with two phases of this interface, which revo...