ABSTRACT
The Library of Congress started as simply and solely Congress's library. Then, mostly because of an acquisition policy that seemed to accumulate anything covered with dried ink, it became a national library, and to be certain that Congress was not forgotten, the Legislative Reference Service was formed in 1914 to concentrate on Congress's library needs. Under the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946, subject specialists were added to the librarians and the lawyers who had previously made up the Legislative Reference Service (LRS) staff. What these new people did differed philosophically from what the Research Services people do, because instead of helping the inquirer do the research himself, the LRS handled the query completely and presented the inquirer with the finished product—searched, compared, projected, and packaged. Before the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970, the Congressional Research Service was staffed by type specialists—water people, welfare people, tax people, atomic energy people.
