Why They Don't Ask Questions.

Abstract

I was annoyed by an article in RQ, Why don't they ask questions? by Mary Jane Swope and Jeffrey Katzer (Winter 1972), be cause it seemed an obvious term paper, that is to say, an incomplete experiment in re search. The sample was too small and, con fined as it was to one academic library, inade quate (in any event) and insulting to the ref erence librarians at that university. It should not have been published, and still the ques tion the authors addressed themselves to in adequately is a good one. And I know, or think I know a good part of the answer; it is a complex lack of confidence on the part of the librarian and of the client. It is an existential or situational problem which calls for an exam ination of the whole situation in which the ref erence librarian and the client find each other and lose confidence. I will try to investigate the situation in three main parts; the physical setting, the psychological limitations, and the organizational setting, which, at least in part, contains elements of and even all of, the oth ers. These could also be described as diffi culties with the way the library is built and how things are arranged in it; difficulties that both librarians and client have thinking of what they are doing and being in the library as well as awkardness on the part of each in acting out whatever they think, and, finally the difficulties the administration of the library adds to the others. I cannot pretend that I have done any original research on any of the foregoing, but I am a reference librarian of considerable experience and thus I may and indeed must, if my profession is any good, claim that I have spent much of my profes sional life struggling with these difficulties and know them well.

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