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LIBRES 2.8 Feature Article

Place and Functionality of Reference Services from the Perspective of
Total Quality Management Theory. (320 lines)
   by Alfred Willis and Eugene E. Matysek, Jr.

*Copyright 1992 Alfred Willis and Eugene E. Matysek, Jr.
========================================================================
         Place and Functionality
          of Reference Services
         from the Perspective of
        Quality Management Theory


Alfred Willis
Architecture Library
Kent State University

Eugene E. Matysek, Jr.
Special Assistant for
Total Quality Management
Defense Fuel Supply Center




     Theoretically, the quantity of
reference services provided by a library
may be regarded as an index of the
inefficiency with which the library is
operating.  At the same time, the
provision of reference services can
arguably perpetuate existing
inefficiencies in the library's operation
and even exacerbate them.
     In any library, the general process
to be carried on is that of putting
specific, concrete embodiments of
informative material ("information
packets," such as books, journals, sound
recordings, maps, microfilms, output from
machine-readable data files, etc.) into
the hands of individual patrons in
response to particular queries.
     In a library operating under a self-
help paradigm, patrons define their
queries for themselves and answer these
queries by locating first the library,
then the optimally relevant information
packets available in or through that
library.  In libraries operating under a
patron-assisted paradigm, patrons request
specific information packets which are
then retrieved by their surrogates on the
library staff (e.g., pages).  One or the
other of these paradigms (or perhaps some
combination of both of them) provides the
organizational model for virtually all
modern American academic and public
libraries.  In either case, patron
satisfaction is a function of the degree
to which the general library process
operates effectively.
     Any process can be described as a
series of events progressively moving
forward over time to produce products or
services for a customer.  The principal
elements of the general library process
are easily identified.  The customers of
this process are the patrons of the
library.  The inputs to the process are
acquired, cataloged, and properly stored
information packets whose topics cover a
determined area of human knowledge.  The
outputs of the process are the
information packets a library's customers
retrieve or receive on various occasions
in response to their queries.  Library
management undertakes the task of
producing access to these packets, i.e.,
of assuring the ongoing movement of
information packets through a library's
physical space to its customers at
optimal rates of both effectiveness and
efficiency.  This task is complex, and
typically involves a labor force divided
into several departmental contingents,
one of which commonly consists of a cadre
of more or less full-time reference
librarians.
     In contemporary American academic
and public libraries, the need for
reference librarians is almost always
taken for granted.  An analysis of the
general library process would suggest,
however, that far from being a necessary
component of such a process functioning
at optimal efficiency, much if not all
reference service actually functions as a
corrective for occasional processual
inefficiencies.
     In an optimally functioning library,
information packets are selected and
acquired at optimal efficiency.  It will
therefore possess exactly the right
books, journals, databases, etc., that
patrons will require, and these items
will be delivered to the library quickly
(or otherwise supplied, as in the case of
online services, without interruption).
It will catalog the information packets
it acquires quickly and accurately.
These items will thus be correctly
described in the library's records, they
will receive correct and full subject
analysis, and to each of their records
all relevant descriptive and subject
headings will be assigned.  The optimally
functioning library will maintain its
catalog in such a way that it will be
usable by patrons with a modicum of
knowledge of its purpose and nature.  The
library will also take steps to teach the
mastery of that knowledge.  The library
will store its information packets
optimally (quickly and accurately), so
that patrons will find each one in its
proper place.  The sympathetic
positioning of correctly functioning
equipment for accessing "disembodied
information" (e.g., CD-ROM players) is
tantamount to storing more traditional
information packets (e.g., books) in
proper order.  All mobile information
packets (i.e., internally or externally
circulating items) will be returned to
their proper places as quickly and
accurately as possible after each
displacement.  Furthermore, in order to
operate at all, the optimally functioning
library's facility must be open, clearly
arranged, free of cumbersome barriers,
well lighted, and appropriately climate-
controlled.  Its electronic equipment
will be maintained in good working order
and kept functioning without unplanned
interruptions....
     In an optimally functioning library,
a patron with a modicum of knowledge of
its organizational scheme (or the
patron's surrogate) should, without the
assistance of a reference librarian and
without undue delay, be able to retrieve
or receive the most suitable information
packets required to answer a given query.
     But in real life, of course, patrons
in self-help libraries are not able to
retrieve exactly the right information
packet responding to their queries in
minimal time, every time.  Instead, they
experience more or less frequent failures
of the library process.  In patron-
assisted libraries also, patrons
experience similar failures.  In such
events, patrons are often encouraged to
seek the assistance of reference
librarians.
     If a library failure is attributable
to the library's failure to acquire the
best source answering to a particular
query, a reference librarian may be asked
to suggest alternative sources.  In so
far as these sources are qualitatively
inferior, harder to use, or more
expensive to access (e.g., via
interlibrary loan), the reference
librarian cannot actually correct the
failure but can only mitigate its
effects.
     If a library failure is attributable
to the library's failure to catalog the
best source properly (e.g., used
incorrect cataloging copy without editing
it to remove significant errors in
headings) or quickly, the reference
librarian might be asked to imagine
alternate retrieval strategies (e.g.,
through elaborate Boolean keyword
searching of the catalog).  Failing this,
the reference librarian might suggest an
alternative source.
     If a library failure is attributable
to the library's failure to store the
best source in its proper place (e.g.,
retained a shelver without adequate
knowledge of the call-number system),
again the reference librarian might be
asked to suggest an alternative source.
     In all such cases, reference work
appears as a quality-control sub-process
at the end of one or more failed library
sub-processes.  It occurs then in
reaction to the consequences that the
failed sub-process(es) have for patrons,
i.e., unacceptable products of the
library process as a whole.
     Admittedly, libraries often invite
their patrons to consult a reference
librarian before a failure occurs.  In
that case (when a library's staff,
management, and patrons have all come to
expect failures in service as a matter of
routine), reference service appears as a
prophylactic rather than as a corrective.
     But whether it operates before the
fact or after the fact to reverse or
mitigate the effects on a patron of an
anticipated or actual library failure, in
so far as it operates only on failed
products of the general library process
and not on the process itself, the work
involved in reference service is of a
nature entirely different from that of
the value-adding work carried out in most
other library departments.  It is
bibliographers, technical-services
personnel, and document-delivery staff
who assure the functioning of the really
crucial sub-processes in a library.  It
is they who can contribute the basic,
value-added functions of selection,
acquisition, cataloging, shelving, final
packaging, etc.  Theirs are the sub-
processes that cannot be eliminated
without eliminating the library
altogether; the sub-processes which do
break down due to understaffing, poor
equipment, lack of training, etc., hence
causing the problems for patrons that
reference librarians typically try to
solve, but whose efficiencies library
management must be concerned with
optimizing.
     One obstacle to the optimization of
sub-processual efficiency in any system,
including libraries, is the scarcity of
fiscal resources available for investment
in strategic improvement in one or
another value-adding sub-process.  The
significance of this obstacle is
exacerbated to the extent that
organizations spend any proportion of
their resources on value-reducing efforts
-- however effective they may be -- to
correct quality flaws found in their
products.
     Quality-control processes are
inherently costly.  They comprise
reactions to problems rather than
constructive improvements to failing or
failed processes.  Because quality-
control processes are therefore the least
cost-effective components of any system,
eliminating them holds the greatest
promise for reducing system costs.
Conversely, investing in improvements to
the value-adding sub-processes of a
system holds the greatest promise for its
functional amelioration.
     In a library, optimizing the value-
adding sub-processes of acquisitions,
cataloging, facilities maintenance, etc.,
obviously should minimize the need for
the quality control typically provided by
reference services.
     Although increasing investment in a
library's administrative and technical
sub-processes thus clearly holds the
greatest promise both for enhancing its
effectiveness and for reducing its costs
by reducing the likelihod or incidence of
processual failures, increasing
investment in reference services is
generally easier to justify.  Increasing
investment in reference services is
especially easy to justify in a library
already functioning sub-optimally, where
the sub-optimal functioning itself will
generate in the patron population a
constant demand for corrective reference
assistance.  The justification will quite
literally materialize itself, in the
bodies of patrons who, having experienced
library failures, line up in growing
numbers before the reference desk to
request assistance.  Strictly speaking,
it is the number of such patrons that is
the index of a library's processual
inefficiency.  But in so far as a library
commits fiscal and human resources to
reference services in the expectation
that those services could make up in
effectiveness what was lost to patrons
through inefficiency, the quantity of
reference services provided becomes, by
extension and proportionally, itself the
index.
     The danger for library management in
accepting uncritically any proposed
justification for continued or even
increased reference services, however, is
considerable -- especially in those
libraries operating with finite human
resources (i.e., all libraries?) and
consequently forced to finance the
proposed quality-control efforts out of
savings in those departments charged with
the execution of the inherently value-
adding sub-processes.  In such a case,
increasing investment in reference
services would be expected to lead to
increasing degradation of the general
library process, and ultimately to the
total collapse of the library system.



SOME PERTINENT LITERATURE

Crosby, Philip B._Quality is Free_ New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1983.

Deming, W. Edwards._Out of the Crisis_
Cambridge, MA: MIT Center for Advanced
Engineering Study, 1982.

Taylor, Robert S. _Value-Added Processes
in Information Systems_ Norwood, NJ:
Ablex, 1986.

White, Herbert S. "The Value-Added
Process of Librarianship."_Library
Journal_114 (January 1989): 62-63.

Wormell, Irene, ed._Information Quality:
Definitions and Dimensions_ London:
Taylor Graham, 1990.