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The United States has suffered in recent years through periods of severe recession resulting in the loss of jobs. While libraries are located in most communities in the nation, the majority have not yet made a serious commitment to respond to the needs of job seekers and career changers. A 1990 Gallup survey found that almost two‐thirds of Americans would seek more information about career options if they had the chance to do it over again. Nearly one in four adults found that information was not available when they were making a decision about jobs. The survey found that “an estimated 12.5 million U.S. adults (seven percent of the adult population) needed help last year in selecting, changing or getting a job.” Minorities, people with less than a high school education, and older adults were more likely to have these problems than college graduates.

Libraries and librarians have long been early adopters of information technologies. For decades, librarians have applied computerization to library operations. Standardization and computerization of bibliographic records decades ago made possible automation of library systems, the creation and utilization of giant bibliographic utilities such as OCLC with its 52 million records. Collaborative adoption of information technologies decades ago brought shared cataloging, on-line public access catalogs, bibliographic databases, enhanced interlibrary loan and document delivery, and acquisition of information in digital formats, resulting in worldwide access to library resources. Nonetheless the revolution in information technologies that produced the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s hit the information profession of librarianship and the educational establishment like an earthquake.

The purpose of this study is to address problems associated with the accessibility of academic library databases.

This study evaluates 32 databases and measures their accessibility to users of adaptive technology.

Based on the results of this study, 72 percent of the evaluated databases were rated as marginally accessible or inaccessible, reflecting a low level of compliance to federal web accessibility legislation and international web accessibility standards. To measure database accessibility to adaptive technology users, this study operationalized accessibility into ten component parts as the Tatomir Accessibility Checklist (TAC) and tested each database on each component.

Findings of this study can be used both by those who purchase and manage databases in libraries to identify the most accessible databases and by designers of the databases to improve specific features.

Need information on programs for homeless persons? On policies and costs for treating persons with AIDS? On groundwater contamination? Waterfront development? Rent control? How about requests for extensive narrative and statistical information on a distant community or metropolitan region? The Index to Current Urban Documents and its accompanying Urban Documents Microfiche Collection are excellent resources for these types of questions. Unfortunately, many libraries that subscribe to the index and microfiche collection fail to use them. In fact, underuse of these resources is probably the norm in most libraries. In a 1986 study of northern Illinois public libraries identified as receiving requests for local government information at least biweekly, none of the librarians interviewed reported having used the Index to Current Urban Documents.

Libraries and the information community have moved rapidly into an era of powerful networked scholarly workstations, large quantities of information accessible in electronic formats, and dispersed information sources connected to regional and national networks. This rich diversity poses new challenges for the provision of appropriate reference services. The University of Texas at Austin General Libraries successfully implemented and tested a prototype solution to the problem of providing reference assistance to scholars who are accessing networked information resources and who are at locations remote from expert librarians. Librarians were able to intervene directly in information access and retrieval sessions, remotely assisting the user during the real‐time, online process. The testbed for the project was a CD‐ROM network delivering U.S. government information to DOS workstations via Ethernets connected to a routed TCP/IP wide‐area network and utilizing off‐the‐shelf remote control software. Although problems with existing technology were discovered, this mode of providing reference assistance is a valid model for future services.

A category of humanities public programming which forms a unique type of “readers' advisory” service has developed in the United States in the past 20 years. Encouraged by funding provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, readers' discussion groups have grown in number and variety in the 1980s. This article reviews the history of humanities public programming, explores the nature of the readers' discussion groups, and examines the effectiveness and impact of these programs.

Few issues in recent times have so provoked debate and dissention within the library field as has the concept of fees for user services. The issue has aroused the passions of our profession precisely because its roots and implications extend far beyond the confines of just one service discipline. Its reflection is mirrored in national debates about the proper spheres of the public and private sectors—in matters of information generation and distribution, certainly, but in a host of other social ramifications as well, amounting virtually to a debate about the most basic values which we have long assumed to constitute the very framework of our democratic and humanistic society.