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Although increased social time is associated with healthier lifestyles, autistic people often present in therapy with social time difficulties. Given the growing interest in digital interventions and their applicability for autistic individuals, a social time app could be beneficial to support autistic people to manage social time, but there is limited research in this field, especially that which involves people with lived experience. The purpose of this study was to use co-production to conduct consultations with expert clinicians about the relationship between autism and social time, and the future development of a smartphone app to monitor and support social time in autistic people.

A qualitative methodology investigated clinicians’ views on the relationship between autism and social time and potential development of a social time app. Clinicians (N = 8) participated in semi-structured interviews facilitated by a researcher with lived experience of autism.

Participants were psychologists and psychotherapists from a specialist autism service. Thematic analysis identified factors associated with social time, such as differences with neurotypical populations, need for balance with non-social time and gender differences. According to participants, advantages of social time were connecting with people and forming relationships, whereas challenges were limited social skills, anxiety and anger and frustration. Suggested features of an app were a user-friendly design, psychoeducational components and prompts and reminders. Potential advantages of the app were support outside of therapy, support in therapy and monitoring emotional responses, whereas challenges were task completion and personalising content.

Findings reinforce the importance of a balance between social and non-social time for autistic people, which could be monitored and supported using a social time app. Clinicians could incorporate use of this app within psychological therapies to support emotional regulation and general functioning.

MANY and sundry are the worries which fall to the lot of the librarian, and the matter of book‐repair is not the least among them. The very limited book‐fund at the disposal of most public library authorities makes it imperative on the part of the librarian to keep the books in his charge in circulation as long as possible, and to do this at a comparatively small cost, in spite of poor paper, poor binding, careless repairing, and unqualified assistants. This presents a problem which to some extent can be solved by the establishment of a small bindery or repairing department, under the control of an assistant who understands the technique of bookbinding.

TECHNICAL Education, after looming before the British public for half a century, is now with us a recognised factor in our national life. The passing of the Technical Instruction Acts of and 1891, and the Local Taxation (Customs and Excise) Act of gave an impetus to the movement, and has produced results of a most gratifying character. Technical schools, or institutions bearing other names in which technical instruction is given, are now considerably more numerous than Public Libraries. According to a return of the National Society for promotion of Technical Education in England (excluding London), 319 technical schools, under municipal and public bodies, have been erected at a cost of £3,186,102—an average of £10,000 per school in round numbers—and of this sum, one quarter of a million has been involved since 1901. In order to obtain an adequate idea of the extent to which technical instruction is given, it is necessary to take into account the higher grade schools and other institutions which are used for this purpose. But if technical schools be numerically stronger than Public Libraries, the former institution is incomplete without the latter. In such isolation, its relative position to the student, is like a conservatory without a garden to the botanist. A Public Library, with carefully selected books of reference, bearing on the subjects taught in the technical school as well as on all the industries carried on in the neighbourhood, is an indispensable condition to the success of the technical school, and I hope County Councils will, in the near future, use their influence to promote the establishment of Public Libraries in every locality where a technical school is considered essential.

In dealing with the relations of the Public Analysts to the Local Authorities, the very wide differences in status and importance exhibited by the various types of local authorities possessing the power to appoint such officers must first be considered. At first sight this matter may appear to be one of minor significance, but it has in reality a most important bearing on the efficiency of the administration of the Acts, and it is one in regard to which future legislation might effect much‐needed reform.

THE Leeds Conference of the Library Association was, in many respects, the most important gathering of librarians which has taken place in Britain since librarianship first became organised. The value and interest of the topics discussed, the joint discussion with representatives of famous educational bodies, and other features of a novel kind, all contributed to give the Leeds meeting a character which was very impressive; and its results are likely to be fruitful, if a strong effort is made to follow up the various important matters which were brought forward.

The sealing of samples purchased under the provisions of the Sale of Food and Drugs Acts has recently been on more than one occasion the subject of articles or letters in this journal. In November last, at a meeting of “The Society of Public Analysts and Other Analytical Chemists,” Mr. H. Droop Richmond opened a formal discussion on the matter, but it cannot be said that the proceedings contributed much to our knowledge of what has taken place in the past, revealed any satisfactory remedy likely to be applicable in the future, or even definitely settled whether any change in our present practice was really required.

THE year that is ending has not been a dramatic one from the library point of view, but it has been full of interest and activity. No outstanding library has been built or re‐modelled, but many quite interesting and effective ones have been added to the service; and there is a growing tendency for the library to enlarge its functions and to become a social centre as well as a place for reading and for the lending of books. The new plan leans towards the library on simple lines, with fewer divisions into apartments; indeed, the library in one room, the smallest models of which are the attractive new libraries at Halifax, forms a norm to which in a greater or less degree the new buildings approximate. Lectures, debating classes, listening groups and exhibitions increase. In respect of listening groups it may be said that the number of libraries now trying them is very large, but they cannot be said to be successful everywhere from the point of view of the mere numbers attending them. We hope this experiment will continue. Children's work increases in almost geometrical ratio to every other kind, and the time has come, as a writer remarks in a contemporary, that the children's librarians were organized.

THIS issue opens the new volume of THE LIBRARY WORLD and it is natural that we should pause to glance at the long road we have travelled. For over forty years our pages have been open to the most progressive and practical facts, theories and methods of librarianship; our contributors have included almost every librarian who has held an important office; and we have always welcomed the work of younger, untried men who seemed to have promise— many of whom have indeed fulfilled it. In the strain and stress of the First World War we maintained interest and forwarded the revisions in library methods which adapted them to the after‐war order. Today we have similar, even severer, problems before us, and we hope to repeat the service we were then able to give. In this we trust that librarians, who have always regarded THE LIBRARY WORLD with affection, will continue to support us and be not tempted because of temporary stringency, to make a victim of a journal which has given so long and so independent a service.

In the 1990s, North American archivists and records managers shifted some of their concern with electronic records and record keeping systems to conducting research about the nature of these records and systems. This essay describes one of the major research projects at the University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences, supported with funding from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. Specifically, the essay focuses on the project's four main products: recordkeeping functional requirements, production rules to support the requirements, metadata specifications for record keeping, and the warrant reflecting the professional and societal endorsement of the concept of the recordkeeping functional requirements.

THE enterprise of two London newspapers, the Tribune (for the second time) and the Daily Chronicle, in organizing exhibitions of books affords a convenient excuse for once again bringing forward proposals for a more permanent exhibition. On many occasions during the past twenty years the writer has made suggestions for the establishment of a central book bazaar, to which every kind of book‐buyer could resort in order to see and handle the latest literature on every subject. An experiment on wrong lines was made by the Library Bureau about fifteen years ago, but here, as in the exhibitions above mentioned, the arrangement was radically bad. Visiting the Daily Chronicle show in company with other librarians, and taking careful note of the planning, one was struck by the inutility of having the books arranged by publishers and not by subjects. Not one visitor in a hundred cares twopence whether books on electricity, biography, history, travel, or even fairy tales, are issued by Longmans, Heinemann, Macmillan, Dent or any other firm. What everyone wants to see is all the recent and latest books on definite subjects collected together in one place. The arrangements at the Chronicle and Tribune shows are just a jumble of old and new books placed in show‐cases by publishers' names, similar to the abortive exhibition held years ago in Bloomsbury Street. What the book‐buyer wants is not a miscellaneous assemblage of books of all periods, from 1877 to date, arranged in an artistic show‐case and placed in charge of a polite youth who only knows his own books—and not too much about them—but a properly classified and arranged collection of the newest books only, which could be expounded by a few experts versed in literature and bibliography. What is the use of salesmen in an exhibition where books are not sold outright? If these exhibitions were strictly limited to the newest books only, there would be much less need for salesmen to be retained as amateur detectives. Another decided blemish on such an exhibition is the absence of a general catalogue. Imagine any exhibition on business lines in which visitors are expected to cart away a load of catalogues issued separately by the various exhibitors and all on entirely different plans of arrangement! The British publisher in nearly everything he does is one of the most hopeless Conservatives in existence. He will not try anything which has not been done by his grandfather or someone even more remote, so that publishing methods remain crystallized almost on eighteenth century lines. The proposal about to be made is perhaps far too revolutionary for the careful consideration of present‐day publishers, but it is made in the sincere hope that it may one day be realized. It has been made before without any definite details, but its general lines have been discussed among librarians for years past.