Introduction

This subject of cooperation in the reference setting is quite close to my heart. I now have 20 years experience as a reference librarian, but it was not always so, and I had to learn, like everybody else, how to cooperate. When I began work as a reference librarian/English bibliographer at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 1983, I was not prepared to understand that virtually everything that I did impacted everyone else. My previous major experience had been as an instructor of freshman composition in a woman’s college before the days of team-teaching and cooperative learning; in the classroom there were only the students and I, and if I didn’t find something creative to do with them, it didn’t get done.