Iowa: Library Journal Online, June 2010.
"The heart of the lingering concern over RA, where there is a division between reference and RA, is not in the basis of our service but a philosophy of worth. In a 1981 speech, preserved in John J. Boll's Reader Services in Libraries: A Day in Honor of Margaret E. Monroe, Monroe painted the rise of adult services as something pretty upsetting to at least some library administrators in the Twenties and Thirties. "For those stern public library administrators who rejected color, motion, maypoles, flowers and enthusiasm," she said, "'adult education' was not the promising chrysalis about to become a glorious 'adult services' creature that would capture the world for public library use, but rather an all-consuming worm to be extirpated before it ate great holes in the bibliographic tapestry and filled the bibliothecal halls with wings, nests, and crawling creatures."
