The Information Service in Practice: An experiment at

The establishment and development of the Information/Research Section at The City University Library is described. The value of providing a partial information service is discussed in the light of three years ’ practical experience. Particular features of The City’s service are the emphasis on individual needs rather than the production of current awareness services of general interest, and the exploitation of special resources such as the British Computer Society Library and the press-cuttings collection. The future is seen in terms of a learning resource centre on the American pattern. Much has been written, as Mr. Linel pointed out recently, on the information needs of scientists and technologists; the existence of a problem has long been recognized and solutions have been suggested which librarians are ready and eager to put into practice. In academic libraries, however, the sheer size of the problem, together with a certain lack of conviction on the part of library users that librarians were capable of supplying an information service on specialist subjects, tended to delay progress in the information field. &dquo;The tradition of self-help in universities&dquo;, Z accepted by librarians and teaching staff alike, led to the discouragement of &dquo;spoon-feeding&dquo; and, since library staffs were already fully occupied with the administration of established services, the problem of information provision was normally shelved as insoluble under prevailing con-ditions. It is not primarily the purpose of this article to add to the discussion of the information requirements of university research personnel, or to state again the problems facing librarians who attempt to fulfil these requirements. The intention is rather to give a factual account of the establishment and development of an information service in the face of the admitted difficulties, and to assess both the extent to which these difhculties were surmountable in practice, and the value of undertaking a project which, it was recognized from the outset, could do little more than scratch the surface of the problem