First‐hand reflections on the realities of reference service

Although I have worked in libraries in one capacity or another for almost 45 years, my experience as a “working” professional librarian was quite limited. It consisted of a little more than a year as a cataloger in the Rutgers University Library just after I received my M.L.S. in 1957. I then jumped, after receiving my Ph.D. in 1959, directly into administrative positions in academic libraries. Throughout my administrative career, however, I continued to be, as I had been since a teenager, an active user of the academic libraries in which I worked as well as of the local public libraries. Like most academic library administrators, I developed a certain removed perspective on what the front‐line professional librarians working for me did. I tried to keep my views to myself and to avoid telling those librarians how to do their job.