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The recent announcement by David Pearson, the Senate House librarian, that all members of the federal University of London - undergraduates, postgraduates and staff - will shortly have automatic entitlement to full borrowing access to the library, is the best news on library provision in the university for 15 years. Indeed, it runs counter to the dismal news from other university and national libraries.

Members of the university should not forget that the abolition of the divisive and bureaucratic subscription banding system by the colleges and the return to a situation of full and equal access - which to any outside observer might seem a self-evident necessity - has been achieved in the face of persistent and wilful obstruction by the self-regarding philistinism of successive college librarians and principals opposed to the fundamental needs of scholarship over many years.

One colleague told me: "This makes me feel like I belong to London University again, as well as to Birkbeck, and it will have the same effect for students."

David Wells
School of Languages, Linguistics and Culture Birkbeck, University of London