USING PUBLIC-LIBRARY REFERENCE COLLECTIONS AND STAFF

An exploratory study of reference services use in a public library was performed through fifty-seven user interviews in an affluent and prim arily Anglo community in California. Two subsequent studies were condu cted in Hispanic and Vietnamese communities. The data from the Angle s ample generated a set of preliminary relationships: mediated and unmed iated searches yield about the same user judgment of completeness; med iated searches yield a somewhat higher judgment of usefulness; users w ho do not ask for help ordinarily have a known source (not an index or catalog) in mind before coming to the library; and searches are overw helmingly of a ''serious'' rather than ''casual'' nature, even to an o utside observer. It was found that additional staff help might have im proved the results for about 40 percent of the searches, including som e cases when the user had had professional-level interactions with the staff. At the broadest level, the idea of the ''search in motion'' wa s affirmed and users were seen to avail themselves of reference servic es in a variety of ways. The findings of the Hispanic and Vietnamese s tudies largely echoed those of the original study; but the Hispanic an d Vietnamese respondents used the reference collection more often for school, and they-especially the Vietnamese-more often brought broad su bject needs, rather than requests for specific information, to the lib rary.