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As I observe reference service taught as a required course in accredited library education programs, I see a heavy dose of exposure to a variety of reference tools and sources framed in something of a vague concept that this is what we do as service professionals. Specialized and advanced reference courses tend to concentrate on more sources of material, usually separated into subject fields such as the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and also into types of materials containing the reference work we seek, such as government publications, prints, photographs, and microforms. There appears to be little discussion about the various kinds of reference clients we might encounter, or the suggestion that different customers might have different levels of required information interaction. Indeed, the suggestion heard increasingly that we stop teaching courses oriented to types of libraries and concentrate on a generic whole, while perhaps desirable from some standpoints, would tend to obliterate those distinctions even further and substitute some sort of generic heading called “reference in any kind of library.” However, there is little discussion about what constitutes adequate levels of reference service, only about the need to answer correctly in whatever framework is provided. The issue of adequacy of services is relegated to the discussion of library budgets rather than to professional considerations, and ultimately reference service results from decisions made by non-librarians who control our resources, but who have no basis for making such decisions except for a preference for spending as little as possible. 24 We speak then of quality, but never within a framework of adequate resources or of approach, and rarely with a thought about determining what that should be.
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