The Teaching of Reference in American Library Schools

Abstract

MISS HARRIS has admirably set forth the present state of reference service and the needs and shortcomings in present-day training of reference librarians. Her moving account of the increasing amount of telephone reference service moves me to assure her that take the matter of For Whom the Telephone Bell Rings almost as seriously as the matter of For Whom the Bell Tolls. Also, for the record, am not scared of automation, am grateful for it. For one thing, what would we do without the telephone?Now propose to present a much more superficial view of what we are teaching in the 32 American Library Association accredited graduate library schools, trying to answer three questions:1. Who is teaching reference?2. What is being taught?3. How is it being taught?Numbers, not names, must suffice for the answer to Who. Some of us have been around a long time. had a fire in my house last fall and all sorts of things boiled up, including a letter from Louis Shores, written in the mid-thirties, in which he said, I try to teach a few titles well. In the same batch of disarranged papers found an old freshman theme of mine on the evils of girls' smoking, piously written in a round, childish hand, with nary a footnote. If had researched the subject back there in 1924, might not have concluded so positively that these girls always wound up in a house of ill fame. Times have changed.Now share Wallace J. Bonk's belief that and calm discussion, coupled with patient effort and a determination to produce the bes~ possible kind of reference and bibliography course, would -result in something more professionally desirable than this present state of affairs. 1But who are these people who will gather for sensible and calm discussion? Who are teaching these reference courses?That meeting in Cleveland in April, 1962, sponsored by the Library Services Branch of the U.S. Office of Education and Western Reserve University to consider the future of library education got me all stirred up. Having read the two issues of Library Trends on the Future of Library Service: Demographic Aspects and Implications, 2 stuffed to the gills with figures on people, their geographic distribution, their doomed cities, their Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas, their age structure, their baby boom, the attending librarians and library school representatives considered the types of competence required to fill the library's changed or changing role. With these in mind, they turned to types and levels of library school faculties, to admission requirements, to the curriculum, teaching methods, interdisciplinary instruction, and research.The great value of the meeting was not so much the original thinking which came out of it, but the opportunity to say out loud to one another what had been said before by other voices in other rooms. For no one expects brilliant, original thinking to take place at an institute. This usually occurs in the silence of a lonely room. And if the recommendations incorporated much already observed in Ernest J. Reece's 1936 study of the curriculum in library schools,3 it should be observed that this was another group saying it.If this seems to be getting a bit offthe track, it is only to remind you that the institute began with the people to be served. And want to begin with the people who are teaching the increasing number of library school students who will serve those people, particularly the increasing number of college graduates, the increasing number of graduate students, of school children, of specialists.The number of reference instructors increased from 87 to 145 between 1958 4 and 1961.5 These were not all full-time faculty, for the same period saw a greater increase in part-time instructors, from 30 in 1958 to 74 in 1961. Nor were all of the 87 persons teaching ref. erence in 1958 still in harness in 1961-only 53. New names in the 1961 roster numbered 92, about two-thirds of the total. …