The University of California Libraries: A Plan for Development (1977)

110 The University of California Libraries
services must suffer. To prevent this from becoming a deterrent to
providing the services, allowance should be made for them in the
budget, and the staffing projections in Chapter IX do so.
The San Diego study indicates the need for librarians to be
aware of other information agencies in their regions, and to refer
users to them whenever appropriate. For this purpose Haak's recommendation
for "a directory of information agencies and libraries that
would state the name of each service clearly, its purpose, its hours
of service, types of services provided, and its special emphasis in
terms of the types of subjects that it can handle" 12 should be imple-
mented in each geographic region of the state, and UC libraries might
well take the lead in this endeavor.
Systemwide. As noted in the earlier planning report entitled The
University of California Libraries: Problems and Prospects, a procedure
is needed for coordination of reference services throughout the
system. In order to insure that, insofar as possible, no reference
question goes unanswered, responsibility for authoritative information
service in specific subject fields should be assigned to particular
libraries or librarians, and other libraries or librarians should forward
reference questions which are beyond their competence to these
bibliothecal "courts of last resort."
As a first step in this direction, a new edition of the UC
Reference Directory should be published, listing the subject expertise
of libraries and librarians in the UC library system to facilitate
referrals to specialists. 13 To keep such information on a current
basis, a coordinator should also be appointed to maintain up-to-date
files on the special expertise of existing staff members, and to
ascertain the subject and language specialties of new staff members
joining the system. Where a particular subject is not covered, staff
members with minimal training in the area should be encouraged to expand
their knowledge of the subject, and financial support should be
given for the necessary course work or training.
12 Haak, p. 6.
13 This recommendation and several related ones are contained in the
report of the LAUC Committee on Reference and Advisory Services,
June 28, 1976.