Libraries across Australia are becoming increasingly involved in the development and implementation of family literacy programs, placing librarians at the centre of this initiative. Better Beginnings is a family literacy program developed by the State Library of Western Australian and delivered throughout the state. The program involves a partnership between public libraries, health professionals and local governments that has developed to support the delivery of early literacy resources and strategies to parents of young babies. Librarians play a major role in the delivery, implementation and sustainability of the program.This paper reports the findings from the longitudinal evaluation of Better Beginnings in four communities, across four years, in relation to the perspectives of librarians responsible for the program in their library. Librarians were interviewed about their role in the program and its effectiveness, the training they had received and the collaboration between the professionals involved in the program. The data revealed that over a period of four years librarians had developed an understanding of the purpose and importance of the program, which had led to a sense of ownership and commitment. This was supported by central coordination of the program and collaboration with child-health nurses. Over the four years, they had developed and increased library activities and created 'family spaces' linked to Better Beginnings. They felt the program was effective in promoting literacy in families with young children, but sought more strategies for engaging families that did not traditionally visit libraries or have access to libraries.

Nationality in dress is the visual manifestation of a communal cultural identity, often idealistic and nostalgic but rarely conforming to individual realities. Most historians of dress are uncomfortable with such a concept, which lends itself all too easily to stereotype and fails to include another crucial factor in social identity, that of class. No discussion of British society, culture, or history can escape the issue of social class, which proves to be an underlining theme in these recent publications. Local distinction in sartorial style is a phenomenon countering the globalization of clothing manufacture that has resulted in the "homogenization" of contemporary fashion and a worldwide flood of standardized jeans, T-shirts, etc. Both books under review examine how British garment industries created fashions to be sold within Britain and beyond and discuss how what appealed to Britons might or might not sell to the Americans, French, and Japanese, whose concept of "Britishness" proved to be something quite different.Alison Goodrum's The National Fabric is the less satisfying of the two books, retaining large chunks of what appears to be an undigested Ph.D. thesis, particularly chapter two. The excessive theorizing, in keeping with much literature on the subject of cultural studies, will be of little interest to readers outside the field of fashion history, and specialists in dress and culture will have read it all before in every other fashion book published by Berg. The title is slightly misleading; the book is not a general assessment of dress, nationality, and globalization in Britain, but an examination of these in the context of two specific companies and how each one's interpretation of "Britishness" sells within and outside Britain. Mulberry, under the direction of Roger Saul, has based its aesthetic on a stereotype of the British upper class in the 1930s: the tweeds, the leather, the tailoring, the floral dresses, the "huntin', fishin', shootin' " gear (77). Goodrum's analysis illustrates that although such a look has had huge and perennial appeal to foreign markets, it has been less reliable commercially on the home front, for within Britain the attraction of such elitist nostalgia is limited. Mulberry had great success in the

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John Redfern's name appears frequently in the history of couture and late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fashion, but information on his business is limited. The following is based on research done for the author's MA in the history of dress at the Courtauld Institute in 1993. It examines John Redfern's early years as a draper and how by 1892, he had become the leading ladies' tailor in Britain and France.

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