The British Library in London houses the Library's main reference collections, spanning manuscripts and printed books from all periods and all over the world, as well as outstanding collections of maps, music philatelic materials, patents, and sound recordings. In addition to published catalogues, a number of unpublished finding aids, including some quite substantial supplementary catalogues and indexes, have been developed over the years. This useful guide gives the locations of these often little-known finding aids, their availability, and the extent and nature of the information held, providing valuable keys to further research among the collections.

This important reference volume covers developments in almost every aspect of British library and information work during the ten-year period 1991-2000. Some forty contributors, all of whom are experts in their subject, provide a robust overview of their specialities along with extensive further references which act as a starting point for further research. The book provides a comprehensive record of what took place in library and information management during a decade of considerable change and challenges. It is an essential reference resource for librarians and information professionals.

Studies in the History of the English Language II: Unfolding Conversations contains selected papers from the SHEL-2 conference held at the University of Washington in Spring 2002. In the volume, scholars from North America and Europe address a broad spectrum of research topics in historical English linguistics, including new theories/methods such as Optimality Theory and corpus linguistics, and traditional fields such as phonology and syntax. In each of the four sections - Philology and linguistics; Corpus- and text-based studies; Constraint-based studies; Dialectology - a key article provides the focal point for a discussion between leading scholars, who respond directly to each other's arguments within the volume. In Section 1, Donka Minkova and Lesley Milroy explore the possibilities of historical sociolinguistics as part of a discussion of the distinction between philology and linguistics. In Section 2, Susan M. Fitzmaurice and Erik Smitterberg provide new research findings on the history and usage of progressive constructions. In Section 3, Geoffrey Russom and Robert D. Fulk reanalyze the development of Middle English alliterative meter. In Section 4, Michael Montgomery, Connie Eble, and Guy Bailey interpret new historical evidence of the pen/pin merger in Southern American English. The remaining articles address equally salient problems and possibilities within the field of historical English linguistics. The volume spans topics and time periods from Proto-Germanic sound change to twenty-first century dialect variation, and methodologies from painstaking philological work with written texts to high-speed data gathering in computerized corpora. As a whole, the volume captures an ongoing conversation at the heart of historical English linguistics: the question of evidence and historical reconstruction.

British Archives is the foremost reference guide to archive resources in the UK. Since publication of the first edition more than ten years ago, it has established itself as an indispensable reference source for everyone who needs rapid access on archives and archive repositories in this country. Over 1200 entries provide detailed information on the nature and extent of the collection as well as the organization holding it. A typical entry includes: name of repositiony; parent organization ; address, telephone, fax, email and website; number for enquiries; days and hours of opening; access restrictions; acquisitions policy; archives of organization; major collections; non-manuscript material; finding aids; facilities; conservation; publications New to this edition: email and web address; expanded bibliography; consolidated repository and collections index

Preliminary Material /Antoinette Renouf and Andrew Kehoe -- The corpus-user's chorus: (Based on The Major General's Song from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance) /Antoinette Renouf and Andrew Kehoe -- Introduction: The changing face of corpus linguistics /Antoinette Renouf and Andrew Kehoe -- Oh Canada! Towards the Corpus of Early Ontario English /Stefan Dollinger -- Favoring Americanisms? vs. before and in Early English in Australia: A corpus-based approach /Clemens Fritz -- Computing the Lexicons of Early Modern English /Ian Lancashire -- EFL dictionaries, grammars and language guides from 1700 to 1850: testing a new corpus on points of spokenness /Manfred Markus -- The Old English Apollonius of Tyre in the light of the Old English Concordancer /Antonio Miranda García , Javier Calle Martín , David Moreno Olalla and Gustavo Muñoz González -- Prediction with SHALL and WILL: a diachronic perspective /Maurizio Gotti -- Circumstantial adverbials in discourse: a synchronic and a diachronic perspective /Anneli Meurman-Solin and Päivi Pahta -- Changes in textual structures of book advertisements in the ZEN Corpus /Caren auf dem Keller -- “Curtains like these are selling right in the city of Chicago for USD 1.50” - The mediopassive in American 20th-century advertising language /Marianne Hundt -- Recent grammatical change in written English 1961-1992: some preliminary findings of a comparison of American with British English /Geoffrey Leech and Nicholas Smith -- Social variation in the use of apology formulae in the British National Corpus /Mats Deutschmann -- How recent is recent? On overcoming interpretational difficulties /Göran Kjellmer -- Looking at looking: Functions and contexts of progressives in spoken English and 'school' English /Ute Römer -- Ditransitives, the Given Before New principle, and textual retrievability: a corpus-based study using ICECUP /Gabriel Ozón -- The Spanish pragmatic marker pues and its English equivalents /Anna-Brita Stenström -- WebCorp: A tool for online linguistic information retrieval and analysis /Barry Morley -- Diachronic linguistic analysis on the web with WebCorp /Andrew Kehoe -- New ways of analysing ESL on the WWW with WebCorp and WebPhraseCount /Josef Schmied -- I'm like, “Hey, it works!”: Using GlossaNet to find attestations of the quotative (be) like in English-language newspapers /Cédrick Fairon and John V. Singler -- Corpus linguistics and English reference grammars /Joybrato Mukherjee -- Tracking ongoing grammatical change and recent diversification in present-day standard English: the complementary role of small and large corpora /Christian Mair -- but it will take time...points of view on a lexical grammar of English /Michaela Mahlberg -- Corpus linguistics, grammar and theory: Report on a panel discussion at the 24th ICAME conference /Jan Aarts.