http://hdl.handle.net/2142/1552 Allerton Park Institute Proceedings (no. 17, 1971); Edited by Carol L Cronus and Linda Crowe http://hdl.handle.net/2142/1624 Panel on information referral projects in libraries: Editor's Note Neither Brenda Dervin nor Robert Croneberger delivered the talks they submitted prior to the conference, and which are included in this volume. Their reactions to previous sessions motivated them to put aside prepared speeches and address themselves to a problem which had been ignored by the conference up to that point. They felt that the participants had been given no conception of the commitment in human terms required by the operation of information centers. Libraries and community Social service --Information services Reference services (Libraries) Community information services Fri, 01 Jan 1971 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/2142/1591 The Research-Action-Teaching Effort at Syracuse University's School Of Library Science Dervin, Brenda This paper gives a very brief overview of the kinds of activities which are going on at Syracuse University which relate to information referral projects. The School of Library Science is involved in a multi -dimensional effort which focuses on the information needs of minorities and the disadvantaged through research action and research teaching. For the past several years , the school has been undergoing a major refocusing of its approach. A great deal of emphasis is being placed on the "people" aspects of librarians hip. The clearest manifestation of this change is the fact that the school now has four social scientists on its faculty of fifteen members. In addition, the school is now in its third year of offering a social science-oriented doctoral program emphasizing the problems of information transfer. The following discussion briefly describes the kinds of activities the Syracuse School of Library Science is involved in and some of the insights they have provided. Libraries and community Social service --Information services Reference services (Libraries) Community information services Fri, 01 Jan 1971 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/2142/1590 Knowledge Is Power: The Detroit Public Library Croneberger, Robert B., Jr. Francis Bacon said ''knowledge is power' 1 and hundreds of libraries have these immortal words inscribed over their entrances. Perhaps T. S. Eliot was closer to the truth when he wrote: All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance. All our ignorance brings us nearer to death, But nearness to death no nearer to God. Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge ? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust. (The Rock, 1934) Anyone interested in information services hears one question with more and more regularity: "What does this work have to do with my profession as librarian?" Libraries across the country are embracing information services as a prodigal returned to the security of its proper home. Library schools are beginning to direct courses toward serving the informationally deprived. Cases are common where the library has announced its entrance into information services, published a few telephone numbers, and then expected its library staff to answer such questions as: "My friend has just taken an overdose what shall I do?" or, even worse, 'I've decided to commit suicide and I want to know the best method." Libraries and community Social service --Information services Reference services (Libraries) Community information services Fri, 01 Jan 1971 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/2142/1589 An Informal Information Service at the Chicago Public Library's Bezazian Branch Dawood, Rosemary Smith The public library in the United States is a community facility dedicated to service to everyone. This broad concept of service, however admirable, implies objectives which public librarians find increasingly difficult to meet with their present limited resources and staff. Because of limited resources, library programs and services are spread thinly over a wide span dealing with education, information, culture and recreation. Meager budgets must be stretched to anticipate and respond to the extreme diversity of a constantly shifting clientele. Responding to drastic changes in neighborhoods is not a new experience for public library administrators and personnel. Occasionally they have been lethargic in responding to changing situations, but meeting social changes has always been a part of public library history. Today public librarians encounter inner-city problems far more complicated than those of previous years. Creative new responses are needed to meet this situation and the informational needs of the residents of these urban centers. Social, political and economic changes have always influenced approaches used by public libraries to reach people and provide the information they request. Librarians ask such questions as, "What new responsibilities should public libraries accept in contributing to the direction of change?" "How far should the public library go in developing the high levels of personal and telephone reference service and information retrieval required by sophisticated urban complexities?" "How many nontraditional library activities should be sponsored by the library to acquaint the low-income inner-city children and adults with the library's presence in the community and the informational services it offers?" Definitive solutions to such questions are not easily reached, but the response to the following question will indicate the extent of the potential solution. "How willing and ready are the public library administrators and staff to change to meet all the information needs of the constituency they serve?" Libraries and community Social service --Information services Reference services (Libraries) Community information services Fri, 01 Jan 1971 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/2142/1588 Model Cities Community Information Center, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Luce, Robert J. In accord with the times, the Free Library of Philadelphia has for the past several years been actively seeking and implementing new ways to serve the inner city. As affluent America moves to the suburbs and invisible America emerges, the need for providing some sort of continuum of informational and cultural exchange has become more apparent. Always in the past the knowledgeable few have managed to tap the vast stores of information hidden away in great libraries, but today neither the human needs of the majority of people can be ignored, nor publicly funded ivory towers stand aside from these needs. During the late 1960s the Free Library administration considered the possibility of reaching the inner city with a community information and referral center. Early in 1970, however, the library found that a Philadelphia Model Cities group had gone much further with a similar idea, which was also to include plans for the use of three-way phones and a computerized data base. The library was then able to secure Library Services and Construction Act funding through the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and a gentlemen's agreement with the Model Cities Project for a joint venture which was to be known as the Model Cities Community Information Center (MCCIC). Libraries and community Social service --Information services Reference services (Libraries) Community information services Fri, 01 Jan 1971 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/2142/1587 Project Aurora, Elyria, Ohio Sager, Donald J. Project Aurora was designed to test library service by caseload. Caseload is a word that has social work connotations, but the intent was only to employ a social work technique, not a social work philosophy, to library service. Funds for the project were provided by the State Library of Ohio under Title I of the Library Services and Construction Act. The test site was Elyria, Ohio, a city of 56,000 twentyfive miles west of Cleveland. A socio-economic cross section of this city was selected for the project including 1,000 families totaling approximately 3,600 to 4,000 people. The rest of the city functioned as a control group. A professional librarian, Joan Schmutzler, was hired as project director, together with a secretary and four fieldworkers. No money was allocated for rent or building and only a limited amount of office equipment was purchased; investment was in people instead. Each of the four fieldworkers, following their training period, was assigned 250 families to serve directly. The fieldworkers operated out of the main library as an interface between the library's professionals and their caseload. None of the fieldworkers were professional librarians. They had a variety of backgrounds and experience. Their main characteristics were an interest in people and a similarity to the people with whom they worked. In contrast to other outreach programs, they neither floated in a neighborhood nor were they assigned a fixed base of operations like a storefront or a community center. They were clientcentered in their service philosophy. Libraries and community Social service --Information services Reference services (Libraries) Community information services Fri, 01 Jan 1971 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/2142/1586 Training Urban Information Specialists Welbourne, James This paper is about the training of urban information specialists , especially as it happened at the University of Maryland. There are many stories on that whole procedure and I have chosen to talk from one vantage point, the idea itself, because I think the concept and the need are even more critical now than when we started in 1970. I would like to disseminate information on what we have learned and what we hope other library schools and institutions will pick up. I will discuss urban information as a field to study and as a professional practice. I do not know what this means for people who are running urban information centers; it could be that the neighborhood information center is one base from which information specialists might work. Our concern was to try to address the critical ghetto problems in this country today, to find those people who are best adapted to solving those problems , to fabricate a living experience that was not insulting to such people, and to communicate to the inner city residents about this service and these professionals. Always in the forefront was service to the people, in particular the Black or the poor in the urban environment of America. Libraries and community Social service --Information services Reference services (Libraries) Community information services Fri, 01 Jan 1971 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/2142/1585 Information and Information Service Centers Drennan, Henry T. All of us utilize information in our lives. Librarians and information scientists value it most highly since their lives are spent in gathering, ordering, storing, and distributing it. A very few in these professions produce information, although all live by it. For all people, however, information is used to reduce the uncertainty of nature. 1 Those in information professions often puzzle over the relatively small use (in their estimation) that the general public makes of their informational product. This concern may be somewhat alarmist. Most of us live in a data -rich society, even, it sometimes seems, in a data -saturated system, and many persons may be evolving immunity mechanisms to the overload. Still, many in the information professions are haunted by the suspicion that a data-rich environment may be a decision-poor environment. Many librarians and information specialists are particularly concerned by the low use of informational services by those perceived as requiring this reinforcement of their environmental competencethe poor. These professions have given a good deal of discussion, with some implementation, to new modes of organization more responsive to this target group. As yet sufficient attention has not been paid to reducing the costs of information to the poor, although we have been developing concepts and a few operational examples. Libraries and community Social service --Information services Reference services (Libraries) Community information services Fri, 01 Jan 1971 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/2142/1584 Linking New and Traditional Library Services Sinclair, Dorothy In some of our larger cities, public libraries are beginning to take on, are being asked to take on, or are considering taking on the functions of the neighborhood information center. To that fact we owe this volume and the institute on which it is based. The role assigned to this writer is that of providing a context, of posing and of trying to throw light on the question: How indeed do neighborhood information center functions relate to our public libraries? This topic will be considered in two large segments, each of which can be stated as a question. The first question is the basic one: Is conducting a neighborhood information center the public library's job? The second is contingent: If libraries accept the job, how do they accommodate the new function onto existing libraries? Libraries and community Social service --Information services Reference services (Libraries) Community information services Fri, 01 Jan 1971 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/2142/1583 Office of Economic Opportunity Community Centers: A Critical Analysis Kopecky, Frank J. As an attorney practicing in the legal services program of the Office of Economic Opportunity (O.E.O.) for the last three years,! have had the opportunity to view several O.E.O. neighborhood centers in operation. In this paper I will discuss the subject of information centers in other disciplines. The legal aid office is a natural disseminator of information. However, in an effort to make this presentation more meaningful I propose not to limit my topic to the legal services program but to discuss and analyze the O.E.O. neighborhood centers. The O.E.O. neighborhood centers were the heart of the "war on poverty." They were to function in the poor neighborhoods and were to bring the war on poverty down to the local level. The centers were to become the informational and service resource of the community; however, most failed. Hopefully something can be learned from the O.E.O. experience. Perhaps presenting my experiences with O.E.O. neighborhood centers will prevent some of their failures from being repeated by other groups or agencies. Initially, I propose to analyze the functions of a neighborhood information center. Secondly, I will examine the O.E.O. model with reference to the functions and criteria proposed. Finally, I will attempt to express my views on the library as an information center in light of the criteria and functions of a neighborhood information center and my experience with the O.E.O. model. Libraries and community Social service --Information services Reference services (Libraries) Community information services Fri, 01 Jan 1971 00:00:00 GMT