ABSTRACT
The motto of all reference librarians probably should be the words of Samuel Johnson in Boswell’s Life of Dr. Johnson (1949): “Knowledge is of two kinds; we know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information upon it” (vol. 1, p. 558). Unfortunately, there appears to be a wide gap between principle and practice, and today’s reference librarians are getting a very low score on their report card of correct answers to reference questions. If Dr. Johnson were alive today, he would be quite chagrined to find that those who work at reference desks in libraries seem to neither have a thorough grounding in general information sources nor can they be relied upon to give a correct answer more than 55% of the time, on average, as numerous studies have reported.
