Flying a light aircraft: reference service evaluation from a user's viewpoint.

This paper reports on the experiences of seventy-seven MLIS students, each of whom visited a library of his or her choice and asked a question that mattered to him or her personally. When these users were asked if they would be willing to return to the same librarian with another ques tion (a measure of reference effectiveness proposed by Durrance in 1989), only 59.7 percent expressed a willing ness to return. Both willingness to return and overall satisfaction were significantly related to the librarian's behavior and the quality of the answer. Users' detailed accounts of their library visits yielded contrasting lists of "most helpful" and "least helpful" features of the service received. Four themes occurred in these narratives: the