College and Research Libraries


Editorial 

COLLEGE 
& RESEARCH 

LIBRARIES 

Articles in this issue address persistent issues in bibliographic instruction and 
standards. With respect to the former, librarians, like their faculty colleagues, 
have long been aware of the need to evaluate instruction, i.e., teaching and learn-
ing. Three articles offer different perspectives on evaluation of bibliographic in-
struction. King compares use of library materials by instructed and noninstructed 
st .Jdents. Nagy and Thomas use an experimental design to evaluate mediated bib-
lit .. graphic instruction. Person reports on a longitudinal study of the effects of bibli-
o~raphic instruction over the four years of a baccalaureate education . What is clear 
fr: 1m these and similar articles is that we, again like our faculty brethren, have a 
long way to go; but evaluate we must, particularly if librarians, who are more late-
ly coming to the teaching fraternity, are to justify, solidify, and improve our posi-
ticn on campus and, not incidentally, the education of our students. 

With respect to standards, one observes with interest that the college library 
standards originally adopted in 1959, and revised and readopted by ACRL in 
1975, are now being subjected to scrutiny and perhaps further revision. In the 
development of standards there is an intrinsic tension between what ought to be 
and what is. On the one hand, to limit our vision to what is or is likely to soon be 
is to institutionalize the status quo. On the other hand, "ought to be" may be so 
far above the "is" or "can be" as to make a standard so improbable of achievement 
as to be worthless. Carpenter's article is a secondary analysis of 1977 NCES data 
on college libraries, as reported on the HEGIS instrument, which compares the 
reality as reported with various quantitative -formulae in the college library stan-
dards. His analysis illustrates dramatically the difference between the formulae in 
the standards and the 1977 realities. While it is essential to know where we are 
relative to where we want to be, a difference in and of itself need not argue for 
reducing our goals. However, the quantitative goals in the standards must be de-
fensible, that is, there must be some reasonably objective argument for using 
some percentage instead of some other, this ratio and not that, this number of 
volumes and not that. 

C.J.S. 

I 5