A report in this Journal on the 1983 Annual General Meeting of the Library Association's International and Comparative Librarianship Group touched on experts and expatriates and reported as follows:

“One participant believed greater care should be taken in the selection of ‘experts’ to advise on the development of library services, while another emphasised that the major role of such people should be to retouch the proposals of local librarians in a language that should be more acceptable to the politicians, rather than to impose Western-Style Systems on African Communities. Several people thought that governments were too ready to listen to expatriates and ‘experts’ and tended to ignore the views of local librarians.”