First‐hand reflections on the realities of reference service

Abstract

Although I have worked in libraries in one capacity or another for almost 45 years, my experience as a “working” professional librarian was quite limited. It consisted of a little more than a year as a cataloger in the Rutgers University Library just after I received my M.L.S. in 1957. I then jumped, after receiving my Ph.D. in 1959, directly into administrative positions in academic libraries. Throughout my administrative career, however, I continued to be, as I had been since a teenager, an active user of the academic libraries in which I worked as well as of the local public libraries. Like most academic library administrators, I developed a certain removed perspective on what the front‐line professional librarians working for me did. I tried to keep my views to myself and to avoid telling those librarians how to do their job.

Citation

Stevens, N.D. (1995), "First‐hand reflections on the realities of reference service", Reference Services Review, Vol. 23 No. 2, pp. 91-96. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb049249