Evaluation of Reference Service for Korean Government Publications

한국 정부간행물 참고서비스의 질측정에 관한 연구

The proper evaluation of reference services requires qualitative approach as well as quantitative one. The quality of a reference service can be evaluated by how promptly and accurately a librarian responds to the user's questions and also by how much the user is satisfied with the librarian's overall performance in providing the answer. In this study, the reference service of an university library was evaluated by the following procedure : 1. Identification of a group of the most frequently referred Korean government publications through two pre-tests of user surveys. 2. Preparation of 130 questions of bibliographic and factual type from the above publications. 3. Selection of 30 questions which can be answered from the collection of the evaluated library. 4. Mimic requests of reference service by 5 proxies trained on the unobtrusive test method with 30 questions asked at various times of the day and on various days of the week during a period of 5 months. 5. Drawing up of response sheets (by proxies) with descriptive comments on library staffs' question administration, response, attitude, etc. 6. Preparation and coding of data tabulation sheets and final analysis. The conclusions of this study are as follows : 1. The user serveys showed that needs for the library service for government publications were great. The $80\%$ of the government publications users were visiting more than two organizations for access to information and the $37\%$ were getting information directly from the publishers. 2. The librarians of the evaluated library could give correct answers to $53\%$ of 30 (bibliographic and factual) guestions. 3. The correctness of answer was independent of the length of the time spent the librarians. The librarians' grasp of the questions and direction of approach determined the success or failure of the service. 4. The librarians relied too much on the reference library catalog which doesn't include many of the government publications of their own collection. 5. The $79\%$ of the failure of the service were due to the librarians' lack of knowledge as to the information source for government publications and the unsystematic method of approach to it.