READER INSTRUCTION IN MODERN UNIVERSITIES

Nearly fourteen years ago my colleague at the University of Glasgow, R. O. MacKenna, wrote in the Journal of Documentation what is virtually the paper I am going to read today (although perhaps I am in a position to translate into practice things which he could only, at that time, discuss in a theoretical way). He called reader instruction ‘a university library problem’; it is still a problem, but there are signs that it is one which is on the way to being solved, or at least one which we now know how to solve if we only had the financial resources to implement the solution.