Librarianship and Social Research in the United States

THE following paragraphs are quoted from an examination paper that has just crossed my desk. The paper was written by a librarian widely known to the profession for long and successful experience as head‐classifier in a famous reference library. As a student in this school, she became sufficiently familiar with methods of research in the social sciences to recognize their application to certain problems in librarianship. The testimony of such a librarian, it would seem, should be accorded a fuller measure of confidence than either the testimony of research students who are not librarians or the testimony of librarians who have no adequate acquaintance with the theory and practice of research in the social sciences. The honesty of the statement is believed to be self‐evident.