The service culture, soft-edged and traditional, represents the historical culture of librarianship, carrying with it our traditional social commitment and service responsibility. By contrast, the entrepreneurial infotech culture is future-oriented, scientific, material, and hard-nosed. The first is linked to personal service, the second to impersonal technology. The first is linked to free access to information, the second to information as a commodity. The first is squarely in the public sector, the second works closely with or is situated in the corporate sector. The first is feminine and the second is masculine.
—Sheila Bertram and Hope Olson1
“Service” is a complex word with many meanings and nuances within meanings. For example, Webster’s Third contains twenty main definitions of the word “service”—most with a number of subdefinitions.2 The definitions that best express my interpretation of service are
• professional or other useful ministrations; and
• effort inspired by philanthropic motives or dedicated to human welfare or betterment.
Read those last few words carefully. They sum up the ethos, motivation, and goals of our profession. In doing so, they tell us that a profession based on service is altruistic at its heart. A librarian’s mission is to serve individuals and, in doing so, to serve society and humanity as a whole.
Without being pious, one can state that the concept of the duty and service inspired by professional values and a desire to better humankind can be a guiding light for all librarians and library policies. It is hard to imagine a productive and effective library that is not imbued with the idea of service; it is easy to envisage a happy work life for an individual in such a library.
Librarianship is a profession defined by service. Every aspect of librarianship, every action that we take as librarians can and should be measured in terms of service. It is important to get away from the negative aspects and definitions of the word (it is unfortunate, in this respect, that the word “service” has cognates with such associations as “servile” and “servant”). Our service can be as large as a successful integration of library use with the undergraduate curriculum, or as small as a single, brief act of helpfulness to a library user. Whichever it is, the value of service can and should pervade our professional lives so that it becomes the yardstick by which we measure all our plans and projects and is the means by which we assess success or failure of all our programs. A successful library multiyear plan measures any proposed change or innovation against its impact on service to that library’s users. Any such plan that ignores service will fail.
One of the most important changes in the wider economy, and one with great (not all benign) implications for society, has been the change from an industrial to a service economy. More than three-quarters of the people in the American labor force work in services; more than half of family incomes is spent on services; and good service is seen to be an important criterion in judging the effectiveness of all organizations.3 Many things that used to be made in the developed world are now made for the developed world in less-developed countries. Insurance salespersons are more easily found than industrial workers, and communities that used to supply muscle power for a manufacturing industry are now facing the difficult transition, through retraining, to supplying service workers. In the new economy, the search for a service edge is an intense part of competition, especially when the service deals with commonly encountered goods. To put it bluntly, in the rare cases in which a company is the only supplier of a widely consumed item, cost and service are of marginal importance. The much more common situation, however, is that of competition between companies that sell similar smartphones, similar inexpensive clothing, seats in identical multiplex cinemas showing identical films for teenagers of all ages, and all the other homogenous items consumed by an increasingly homogenous society. The edge is to be found in two areas: cost and service.
It is striking that many of the most successful companies, nationally and globally, are noted for their service and attention to the individual customer. Further, that emphasis is growing as it becomes more difficult to find striking price differences in bands of company type (e.g., inexpensive apparel, chain restaurants, computer vendors).
Improvements and innovations in service in the commercial world have been achieved by two, sometimes antithetical, means—technology and human contact. Well-designed technology can lead to great increases in service and consequent customer satisfaction. The more successful enterprises in online commerce (Zappos, e-Bay, Amazon, etc.) are eloquent testimonials to technology driven service. On the other hand, technology used to replace human contact for cost-cutting reasons (e.g., electronic banking, seemingly endless multiple choice telephone systems) has, in many cases, led to a customer backlash. In those instances, customers perceived the elimination of the human factor as a loss of service and have often caused companies to reverse their strategy.
The vast majority of libraries operate in the public sector and, even when they do not, are seldom judged in terms of price. (They are increasingly subject to cost-efficiency and cost-benefit assessment, but that is different from being concerned with the unit price of services.) Of the two ways to get an edge, therefore, service is the one that applies to most of us. We, too, have to balance technology and the human factor in our drive to achieve better levels of service.
The test of service in libraries lies not in its definition or philosophical underpinnings but in our practical applications of that value. To understand those practical applications, we have to create and apply evaluative procedures. There are many ways to measure service (e.g., tallies of online use, number of reference questions answered, number of materials requests filled within two months, number of students completing formal library instruction programs) but some dimensions of service—particularly those connected with the human element—are difficult or impossible to quantify. Measuring the quantity of questions answered is infinitely easier than assessing the quality of those answers. Measuring the number of students reached in an outreach program is a cakewalk compared to assessing the outcomes of that outreach. In libraries as in all aspects of life, it is easier to count items, transactions, and so on, than to assess quality.4 This is not to say that we should abandon the attempt to evaluate in terms of quality, but to emphasize that human-to-human transactions are, by definition, complex and multidimensional.
What is the universe of service in libraries? It is all too easy to concentrate on the service element in what most libraries used to call “public services”—reference and user services,5 branch library service, special and subject library work. We should not forget that service may be direct or indirect, and that a service rendered indirectly is equal in importance to direct human-to-human service.
A technical processing operation that identifies the materials needed by library users and ensures speedy and timely accession and cataloguing (even in the debased form of metadata) to make those materials available for use is just as much in the business of service as is a busy user service point. Indirect service by technical processing is also just as involved with the human aspect of library use as is a more direct public service unit. Ensuring that library users have timely and efficient access to the materials they want is an important component of the service role of the library. So is the construction of user-friendly bibliographic control systems that enable users to locate the resources they need. In the past, it was too easy for bibliographic control work and systems work to become ends in themselves, without regard for the users of catalogues, other finding tools, and online systems—thus leading to the stereotypes of the rule-obsessed and usually reclusive cataloguer and the technology-obsessed library techie. I am certain that, for a variety of reasons, those attitudes are fading and user-friendly systems are becoming commonplace, as are service-oriented procedures in processing and systems. The service rendered by technical processing and systems units includes the following:
• selecting appropriate resources
• working with materials vendors to establish plans to ensure the speedy delivery of needed items, both classes of material and individual orders
• establishing contracts for continuing access to online and e-resources
• cataloguing and classifying materials using national and international standards to make them accessible to library users
• building and maintaining local catalogues and contributing quality bibliographic data to regional, national, and other shared databases
• contributing to the design and implementation of advanced, user-friendly online systems that integrate access to the whole range of resources
Given these necessary contributions to user service, it is especially regrettable that library administrators who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing are busily dismantling cataloguing departments, trusting in the chimera of keyword searching while increasing the funding of bloated IT departments. This is like a botanical garden ceasing to buy seeds and plants and spending the money they “save” on shovels and hoes.
The human service encounter is at the heart of every service. Everything flows from it. A service encounter is an event at which a user of service interacts with a service provider and a commodity (tangible or linguistic) is exchanged. Service encounters are rich and complex, involving personalities, perceptions, value judgments, verbal and nonverbal communications, and, above all, the ability of the humans involved to reach an understanding of the requirements of the user and to match the service required with those requirements.6
Just as in a commercial service enterprise, it is easier for the library user to see the direct service element than to discern the many activities of those in back rooms. It is easier to grasp the service dimension of public services than it is almost any other library activity. Though those services have expanded beyond “the person at the reference desk” and may take place in person or online, they still maintain that vital component of human interaction—that moment of truth—at the center of their service, however, wherever, and whenever that service encounter takes place.
One text contains a service matrix of which the axes are willingness/unwillingness to serve and ability/inability to serve, leading to four categories of service personnel: those who are willing and able; those who are willing but unable; those who are able but unwilling; and those who are unwilling and unable.7 Good management is aimed at getting all personnel into the first category and discovering, as a preliminary to retraining and reorientation, why the negative characteristics of those in the other three categories exist. This is vitally important as the person delivering a service represents the whole entity (the service provider), and the provider (the library in this case) is judged by the qualities, positive and negative, of that person.
As has been shown in many department stores, banks, travel agencies, and other commercial concerns, people in need of assistance want the person from whom they seek help to be
• approachable,
• knowledgeable, and
• comprehensible.
Approachability does not involve the mindless friendliness of the “Hi, you guys” and “Have a nice day” variety, but it is seriously compromised by a grim or arrogant demeanor. The very furniture and layout of a service area can influence whether library users use the service that is offered. The stereotype of the drearily aloof librarian behind a high desk looking down on enquirers is potent precisely because it matches the secret fears (and, alas, experience in some cases) of library users. One should never forget the fact that asking a question (in person or online) involves a major vulnerability—the fear of being judged to be stupid. Another factor in approachability is simple presence. Is an initial question posed online answered promptly? Is there always someone at the service point? How long does the library user have to wait before asking his question? How busy does the librarian appear to be when approached? How genuinely friendly is the response from the librarian? How good is the librarian at dealing with people of different ages, ethnicities, educational levels, and so on with the same level of courtesy and dignity? It is difficult, though by no means impossible, to use these and similar questions as part of the assessment of the service encounters in your library. Another potent approach to evaluation is simply to put yourself in the place of the library user and ask, which characteristics would you like to see as a user of this service?
Being knowledgeable is obviously a minimal qualification for a service librarian. The level of knowledge and the areas in which the librarian is knowledgeable are most important. A good service librarian knows
• the maps of the bibliographic universe provided by catalogues and classifications
• the collections in her library
• the strengths and limitations of online resources available to the library’s users
• how to conduct the service encounter in person or online
• the type and quantity of information that is appropriate to the needs of the library user
There are recurring patterns in inquiry that are known to the expert service librarian. They have been summarized by the estimable author and Library of Congress reference librarian Thomas Mann as:
• patterns in the types of question that people ask, and in how they ask them
• patterns in the usually unconscious assumptions they hold about what can be done
• patterns in the bad advice they are sometimes given by teachers, employers, and colleagues
• patterns in the mistakes and omissions that reduce the efficiency of their research8
Mann goes on to write, “Viewed collectively, these patterns tend to suggest the areas in which most people need the most help. . . .” Though Mann lays out those patterns in a book aimed at helping individual researchers to be their own “research librarians,” the patterns he describes play an important part in the service encounter and its outcomes. Skilled librarians take them into account and render their best service by complementing the problems they pose and giving the library users what they need, irrespective of how well those users have formulated those needs.
Mann was writing in the late twentieth century, and it is easy to see that conditions in which service encounters take place in libraries, the nature and quantity of those encounters, and other factors have changed. That is so; but the fact remains that service encounters—however and wherever they take place—are subject to the same human factors as they were twenty years ago and a hundred years ago and as they will be as long as librarians are facilitating human interactions with the human record.
I wrote earlier that good service librarians should be comprehensible. I am not referring only to their grasp of the English language—though here, as in all aspects of librarianship, the ability to communicate in clear, direct language is a decided asset. When considering the desired abilities in a reference librarian, knowledge at various levels is clearly very important, but it is also important to remember that knowledge can be negated by an inability to communicate it. Zeithaml et al. provide a definitive brief explanation of the purpose of communication in service: “Keeping customers informed in language they can understand and listening to them.”9 The important points here are the matter of using language that the service user can understand and the two-way nature of the communication. Just as the amount and type of information in an answer should be appropriate to the needs and nature of the questioner, so should the language used in answering.
A service librarian—particularly one in a large general library—is going to encounter all kinds and conditions of people. That it is imperative for librarians serving diverse populations to be able to communicate at a variety of different levels and to recognize the appropriate level to communicate in each service encounter.
The need to listen in the service encounter cannot be overstressed. All experienced librarians know that the initial question in a service encounter rarely contains all that the questioner wishes to know. Most commonly, the first question is couched in much more general terms than the person really intends. For example, the question may be “Where can I find census data?” but the intention is to discover the number of Native Americans in California. Another example is “How can I find information on budget deficits?” when the intention would be better conveyed by “I am writing a term paper on the deficits of the 1980s and would like some relevant information.” Discerning the intention behind the question requires careful listening and probing—skills that the most knowledgeable may not always possess instinctively.
My former colleague Dave Tyckoson is the author of an important general article on reference published in the 1990s.10 In it he reviewed the various alternatives to “traditional” reference desk services that had been proposed in the past fifteen years and found each of them wanting. Those alternatives include expert systems (the use of technology as a substitute for human contact); e-mail interaction; “tiered” service, in which different levels of staff categorize questions and deal with them accordingly; team staffing of reference desks; replacing immediate access to reference librarians by “appointment” systems; and eliminating reference service altogether. Tyckoson dissected each of these solutions and found them wanting, the last coming in for some justifiably harsh criticism involving, as it does, drivel about “access engineers,” “knowledge cartography,” and the former reference librarian as market researcher.11 His conclusion was that the only thing that was wrong with reference service carried out by means of the human-to-human reference encounter is that it was underfunded and undersupported.
It seems to me that Tyckoson’s analysis still stands, with the single and significant exception of online reference (through “chat,” e-mail, instant messaging, etc.), which has benefited from technological and other developments not present when his article was written. It should be noted that this positive online development still rests on the requirements for all human service interactions being met. See, for example, the study of “query clarification” on online chat reference service by Radford and others,12 which, in essence, refers to the same issues of communication that arose when face-to-face interactions were the only service encounters.
Service librarians are under stress, but that stress is not inherent to the service encounter. It is caused by overwork and doing more with less. Library administrators who wish to run libraries that function at a high level of service have to fund and support this most visible of all library services.
A service philosophy should be promoted that affords equal access to information for all in the academic community with no discrimination on the basis of race, values, gender, sexual orientation, cultural or ethnic background, physical or learning disability, economic status, religious beliefs, or views.13
Perhaps the most obvious manifestation of the altruistic service ethic that pervades librarianship is our historic mission to help everybody, but especially the poor, societally disadvantaged, and powerless. In all kinds of libraries, you can, should, and must see a concentration on service to those who need it most.
It is an axiom in business that, in order to succeed, a company must have, identify, and maintain a customer base and provide the services those people want and need. For that reason, most companies not only do expensive research into groups to which they wish to sell a product or service, but also pay large sums to maintain the information in that database in order to keep the information current. It seems easy to define the community served by any given library: a municipality; a university community; a company; a nation; pupils in a school; patients, nurses, and doctors in a hospital, and so on—but that ease of definition is often illusory. Almost all libraries also serve people who are outside their “natural” constituencies, and that phenomenon increases as libraries cooperate and create more and larger alliances. However complicated arriving at that definition may be, the definition of the community served is essential if the library is to focus its services where they are needed. It is also important to define a core community and peripheral communities in order to apply budgeting and service priorities to each.
The primary community served by a public library is defined by political boundaries and is funded on the basis of service to those who live in the political entity. Except in the case of small homogenous towns and sparsely populated rural counties, a public library will serve a wide range of people and differing groups defined by age, income, ethnicity, language, and so on. This is complicated further because, in addition to service to library users who live in the community served, modern public libraries have other users. Almost invariably, cities today are surrounded by separate political entities (suburban communities) that house large numbers of people who work in those cities and use their public libraries. Most public libraries are involved in cooperative arrangements that facilitate mutual acceptance of library privileges from other public libraries, interlibrary loan, cooperative purchase of online services and databases, and other means for users of other libraries to use their services and resources. All the groups—within and without the political entity that funds the public library—have to be taken into account in formulating a service plan, including the priorities assigned to each group.
The heaviest users of public libraries are the young and poorer senior citizens—the least powerful groups in our society. As described in chapter 4, public libraries were created in the nineteenth century for the poor and, in many cases, evolved into “the people’s universities”—the means for poor people to escape the bondage of poverty through self-education. In addition to the users in the library’s buildings, public libraries have often reached out beyond their walls to provide services to the housebound and the incarcerated and to those in remote areas by means of mobile libraries. Bringing library services to the sick and the lonely and the desperate is another demonstration of higher levels of service. Almost all communities prize the children’s library and its services above all other programs offered by the public library.14 It is important in this context to note that children share with the poor and the old the characteristic of less mobility than other groups (the least mobile are poor children and poor old people). A number of libraries have successful outreach programs for both groups because of that lack of mobility.15 If service to children is a political and moral priority, the funding argument that rages in many places about local versus centralized public library service should be heavily weighted in favor of local service.
Libraries that serve higher education at all levels—community colleges, liberal arts colleges, universities—almost always have a defined service community on which they concentrate. That community may be central; but it does not include all those served by those academic libraries. To begin with—and especially for publicly supported institutions—there is also the population in the wider community: the “town.” Colleges and universities, particularly large institutions in small towns (“college towns” such as Urbana, Ill.; Bloomington, Ind.; and Ithaca, N.Y.), are a major cultural, political, and societal presence in their communities. They cannot, even if they wish, stand aside from the community and neither can the academic library. Publicly and privately supported institutions that hold depository collections of federal and state documents are obliged by law to make those collections available to any member of the public. Publicly supported institutions cannot deny access to their facilities to taxpayers and their families. They may withhold access to certain library services—borrowing privileges, interlibrary loan services, access to online databases—that they offer to their students and faculty, but they may not or cannot withhold other services and access.
On a mundane—though important—level, we should note that few academic libraries are funded to provide services or to persons who are not members of the academic community. Those users from outside that community cannot easily be persuaded that they are not entitled to the use of facilities and services that are largely paid for with tax revenues. Nor would it be in the political or moral interest of the academic library and its institution either to make that case or to act on it. To take a common example, many urban academic libraries are used heavily by high school students, particularly in the evenings and on weekends. There are numerous instances of librarians in those libraries reporting that they are inundated by requests for assistance from high school students, sometimes to the detriment of the service they give to “their” students. Similarly, many public terminals in those libraries are used in the evenings and on weekends by high school students trying to meet assignment deadlines. Not a penny of the library’s funding is based on the provision of reference service to, or terminals for the use of, high school students. However, state universities and colleges that seek to recruit high-quality students have a particular interest in encouraging the kind of student who is diligent or intellectually curious enough to pursue an assignment in an academic library. On the one hand, the library is being asked to provide services for which it is not funded. On the other hand, the library is serving the educational goals of the high school students and the institution by providing those services. The answer, I believe, is a more imaginative approach to cooperation and funding for mutual benefit among all educational levels. Is there any reason in principle for opposing an integrated approach to funding library services for students from kindergarten through graduate school using state and local funding sources? Is there any reason in principle why public, school, and academic libraries in a community should not integrate their funding in search of maximizing the total library service for that community? The answer to both questions is no, but that does not explain away the enormous number of practical and bureaucratic obstacles to such a service-oriented approach.
Academic libraries spend a large and increasing amount of money on online and human-to-human library instruction—a service that, by definition, disproportionately benefits disadvantaged students. The reason for the latter is very simple. There are three broad classes of entrants to state universities: high school graduates, community college transfers, and “re-entry” students. The high school graduates that need library instruction most are those from deprived backgrounds, because the current method of financing public education means that the better schools are found in rich neighborhoods and the poorer schools in poor neighborhoods—the latter containing higher numbers of minority students. A high proportion of community college attendees are from the less-wealthy population (because of the far lower fees those colleges charge). “Re-entry” students are those adults who return to college, usually with the objective of improving their job prospects after they have been divorced or downsized or have undergone some other life-changing experience. Such library skills as they have are likely to be outmoded. All three groups add up to substantial numbers of people who really need library instruction to empower them to profit from higher education. I would suggest that one could not find a better expression of the service ethic than bringing familiarity with the human record and how to use it effectively to those who really need it.
School librarians have a well-defined primary clientele: the children and young adults learning in the school the library serves. They have an important role in education, standing in the same relation to the school that the academic library does to the university or college. Their role is to provide another dimension complementing classroom instruction in giving access to recorded knowledge and information in all formats. They also have a strong instructional role—teaching young people how to use libraries and, even more important, helping in literacy teaching and the acquiring of a love of reading and learning. These heavy tasks require a variety of professional skills combined with dedication and empathy. The fact is that they are too often exercised in environments lacking necessary resources.
One of the sadder manifestations of the “crisis” in public education has been the decline of the school library in many states. When budget cuts hit, school administrators cut those functions that they regard as less essential. Given the hype about the “age of information,” it is easy to see that such administrators, clutching at technological straws, class libraries (and the space they occupy—important to the distressing number of space-strapped schools) as “inessential,” together with the arts, music, and other intangible benefits that are undervalued in a materialistic age. Just consider the Los Angeles public school system. It is reported that, in 2014, 87 percent of schools in that system have no credentialed librarian and half of the schools that have libraries have no trained staff of any kind to run them. This in a system that is continuing to pour money into an iPad program that has already cost more than a billion dollars.16 This is but one particularly egregious example among far too many across the country.
Far from being inessential, school libraries and school librarians are vital to education, not least because they can be—and are—the basis for literacy and lifelong learning. Does anyone doubt that today’s lower levels of young people’s proficiency in reading and writing are linked to the underfunding of school libraries and their services? Even when schools have maintained their “libraries,” they have often done away with their librarians. A “library” without professional assistance is just a room with books and other resources in it—not much of an advance on no library at all. If we want strong public education—something that even its severest critics favor (at least nominally)—and believe it to be a mainstay of democracy, we must support and encourage strong school libraries and our colleagues who work in them.
There are many types of for-profit and nonprofit concern—from museums to research laboratories to software companies to foundations to law firms to auto manufacturers—that possess libraries. Those libraries are as various as the organizations they serve, and their services are tailored to particular clienteles. It is relatively simple for the librarians of those libraries to define their user groups and their mission. It is also relatively easy to gauge the success or otherwise of the service they offer. Because many special libraries are in for-profit entities and because their users are so clearly defined, it is not surprising that special libraries have been leaders in innovation in librarianship and the use of technology. This has benefited the profession as a whole as those innovations have often been transferable to libraries with more diffuse missions and user groups.
Some of the most rewarding and demanding jobs and opportunities to serve available to librarians are found in hospitals, hospices, retirement homes, and prisons. Without library values (particularly that of service), work in such libraries would be difficult if not impossible, and the difficulties of the users of those libraries would overwhelm the librarians who work in them. In some cases, the local public library is responsible for library service to the ill, the institutionalized, and the incarcerated. In many others, the library is part of the institution itself. Reading and other library services can be consolations and blessings to all of us; how much more are they consolations and blessings to those in extreme circumstances? Those who are ill or alone treasure reading matter that will take them out of themselves, that will provide insight into their condition and the human condition, and that will enable them to pass the days. Those who are imprisoned (vastly too many in the United States today) read for those purposes, too, but they also read for more practical reasons—to learn the law and to become more educated. The rate of illiteracy in the prison population is far higher than among those outside, and increasing literacy is a proven antidote to recidivism. A prison librarian can turn a life around—an awesome responsibility but one that is in the best traditions of the service ethic of our profession.
Libraries exist to serve their communities and society as a whole. Librarianship is suffused with the idea of service. It is very important that we continue to seek innovation in service, from any source we can. It is equally important that our service be informed with humanistic values as opposed to materialistic values. Business practices may well offer us some good ideas and approaches, but they should be used and adapted with caution. Our work is to serve the individual, groups of individuals, communities, and society, acting idealistically in a materialistic age. Those ideals, though, need to take reality into account—no one is served by impractical goals and visions divorced from reality.
Notes
1. Bertram, Sheila and Olson, Hope. “Culture clash.” Library journal, volume 121, issue 17 (October 1996) pages 36–37.
2. Webster’s Third new international dictionary.
3. Gutek, Barbara A. The dynamics of service. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995.
4. Baker, Sharon L. and Lancaster, F. Wilfrid. The measurement and evaluation of library services, second edition. Arlington, Va.: Information Resources Press, 1991.
5. Some libraries seem to be in a contest to come up with the most inane substitute for “reference librarian.” My least favorite is “interpretive services librarian,” which summons nothing so much as a vision of white-faced mimes.
6. See: Ventola, Eija. “Revisiting service encounter genre: some reflections.” Folia linguistica, volume 39, issues 1–2, pages 19–43.
7. Zeithaml, Valarie A., et al., Delivering quality service. New York: Free Press, 1990. page 136.
8. Mann, Thomas. The Oxford guide to library research. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. pages xvii-xviii.
9. Zeithaml, Delivering quality service. page 22.
10. Tyckoson, David. “What’s right with reference.” American libraries, volume 30, number 5 (May 1999) pages 57–63. The article is a response to: Miller, Bill. “What’s wrong with reference: coping with success and failure at the reference desk.” American libraries, volume 15, number 5 (May 1984) pages 303–306; 321–322.
11. Campbell, Jerry. “Shaking the conceptual foundations of reference.” Reference services review, volume 20, number 4 (Winter 1992) pages 29–36.
12. Radford, Marie L., et al. “Are we getting warmer?” Reference & user services quarterly, volume 50, number 3 (Spring 2011) pages 259–279.
13. Association of College and Research Libraries. “Intellectual freedom principles of academic libraries.” Principle 10 (June 1999). www.ala.org/Template.cfm?Section=interpretations&Template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=8551 (consulted August 25, 2014).
14. Buildings, books, and bytes. Issued by the Benton Foundation. Washington, DC: 1996. The report states that children’s services were by far the most valued library service by the focus group they assembled. See Library trends, volume 46, number 1 (Summer 1997) pages 178–223.
15. See, for example: Swell, Kim. “Beyond library walls” Children & libraries: The journal of the Association for Library Service to Children, volume 10, issue 1 (Spring 2012) pages 27–29.
16. Hing, Julianne. The nation, February 10, 2014. page 6.