January 5, 1981

WASHINGTON THE Saturday night queues already had begun at Gepetto, Viet Huong, Bistro Francais, The Big Cheese and other gourmet stops along Georgetown's restaurant row. Inside Yates Fieldhouse on the Georgetown University campus, however, Hana Mandlikova, her body still experiencing jet lag after a 15-hour trip from Prague and Amsterdam, was trading shots with Betty Stove, her coach and friend. Wearing a white sweatshirt for part of the practice with the words ''It's Great to Be A Champion'' printed across the front, Miss Mandlikova seemed oblivious to time zones or travel fatigue. She bounced on her toes, waved a wooden racquet almost magically in her right hand, punched through volleys and put away over heads. ''That T-shirt looks good on you,'' an impressed spectator said, at the conclusion of the 45-minute drill that attracted curious crowds of students from adjacent basketball and tennis courts.

A dispatch by United Press International in Saturday's editions reported incorrectly that Belau, formerly the Palau Islands in Micronesia, became an independent nation on Jan. 1. In fact, on that date Belau installed its first constitutional government, but it will continue to operate as a United States-administered trust territory.

The turbulent trading floor of the Chicago Board of Trade has often been described as a circus, but on the afternoon of New Year's Eve, it came closer than usual to being one. With traditional whimsy, the exchange fathers watched attentively from the trading pits as Dalmatians jumped roped, monkeys pranced through the aisles and clowns passed out presents and baloons. It was the Board of Trade's annual rite for children of the staff and members of the exchange. Celebrating another year of record volume on the exchange and in the futures trading industry, the partygoers were in a distinctly more festive mood than early last year when the grain embargo and the collapse of the silver markets slowed futures trading to a crawl.

A report that Iran had transferred three Americans from the Foreign Ministry in Teheran to a secret location, possibly with some of the other 49 hostages, has left United States officials surprised and concerned, the Carter Administration said today. The move, first reported early today by Pars, the Iranian press agency, was said to involve L. Bruce Laingen, who as charge d'affaires is the senior United States diplomat in Iran; Victor L. Tomseth, a political officer, and Michael Howland, a State Department security officer. The three had been living under relatively comfortable conditions in the Foreign Ministry since the seizure of the hostages Nov. 4, 1979. Proposals Are 'Under Study' The Pars report quoted Ahmad Azizi, who holds the title of Director of Hostage Affairs, as saying that the three had been moved ''to a more appropriate place of residence.''

Spurred by the feminist movement of the last decade, women's history libraries and collections across the United States have opened their doors and are expanding as never before. The giants among them, notably the Elizabeth and Arthur Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Mass., and the Sophia Smith Collection, at Smith College in Northampton, Mass., both founded in the early 1940's, are being showered with donations and students' and authors' requests for access. Research visits at the Schlesinger - considered the foremost repository in the country devoted solely to women's history -shot up from 247 in 1970 to more than 4,000 in 1980. The 20,000 volumes in the library, including 3,000 cookbooks, grew from 8,000 in 1968. The great collections at the Schlesinger range from those of Betty Friedan and the National Organization for Women to ''the French chef,'' Julia Child; from the records of the Lydia Pinkham Company, maker of ''little pink pills,'' to those of the suffragists, the abolitonists and the Female Bible Society of Boston and Vicinity. The Sophia Smith Collection is famous above all for the papers of Margaret Sanger and the birth control movement; its lesser-known photo collection is choice and historic.