Salutations!

I’m starting to dig through my discussion board posts over the past two years during my MSLS program and thought I’d share what a little piece on the origin of the phrase “Reference Librarian” from some of the assigned articles and textbook my professor had us reading and discussing during LS 500: Information Sources & Services in Spring 2022.

The origin of the phrase “reference service” has evolved over time. Samuel Green (1876) does not use the actual term once in his article “Personal Relations Between Librarians and Readers,” yet he acknowledges that “persons who use a popular library for purposes of investigation generally need a great deal of assistance” (para. 4), which alludes to reference service as we know it today. Listing various examples of patrons and their queries, Green paints an informative picture highlighting the varied situations librarians face when providing reference service. According to Samuel Rothstein’s 1972 work that was cited in our textbook, the phrase “reference services” seems to have come from Melvil Dewey’s usage of the title “reference librarian” doing “reference work” in 1885 to describe the first multiple-librarian reference department at Columbia (Tyckoson, 2020, p. 8). I found a couple of interesting articles when looking for the origin of the phrase in the databases, one of which heavily cites Green’s article and quotes large passages from Dewey about the library profession; although no history of the specific phrase “reference service” is given in the article I found entitled “Working the Reference,” it is noted that “by 1876, serious thought was being given to providing some form of reader assistance,” with Librarian of Congress A. R. Spofford being “a proponent of reference works as a means of reader assistance, to save time for both the librarian and the reader” (Genz, 1998, para. 3).

RLGing,

Sarah Hope

References

Genz, M. D. (1998). Working the reference desk. Library Trends, 46(3), 505–525.

Green, S. S (1876). Personal relations between librarians and readers. Library Journal, 1, 74-81. Reprint.

Tyckoson, D. A. (2020). History and functions of reference service. In M. A. Wong & L. Saunders (Eds.), Reference and information services: An introduction. (6th ed, pp. 3-26). Libraries Unlimited.