With respect to remarks by Gretchen Whitney--

"[Libraries] just aren't trusted information resources."

Do you mean "trusted" or do you mean something more akin to 
"convenient" or perhaps something akin to "easy and 
understandable"?  If the students rarely go to a library or have 
rarely gone to a library to find information, would their reaction to 
it be a matter of trust or of something else?  Trust or the lack of 
it sounds like they went to a library but got bad information or no 
information at all at some point, or perceived that they did.
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"[Finding information gave] them a sense of personal empowerment. "

The word "empowerment" has been used for rationalizing library 
service for some years now.  Witness the book  _Information power : 
guidelines for school library media programs / prepared by the 
American Association of School Librarians and Association for 
Educational Communications and Technology_  (Chicago:  ALA, 
1988).  The gist of it is that finding relevant information is 
personally empowering.

But, what does empowerment really mean?  Perhaps more importantly, 
can such personal empowerment be measured any more than, say, earlier 
general library aspirations such as "self-improvement through 
reading" or "adult education", two phrases that come from the periods 
1850 to about 1900 and 1925 to about 1965 or so, respectively.
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   "The situation is bad enough for young people. They can't find the 
sex information that they need, and are driven to other resources, 
for example. Libraries don't tell them how to avoid STDs, and don't 
tell them who can."

It would be interesting to hear Ann Bishop of UIUC comment on this 
rather general assertion given the nature of her community 
involvement sense of library service.

     "The situation is worse, far worse, for seniors, who seek info 
on Social Security, the national financial situation, their pensions, 
their retirement accounts, and the like.
Libraries (in my experience) simply run from these issues. They 
themselves are untrained in these issues, and they have no earthly 
idea how to refer users to others trained in these issues. Again, 
they don't know how to refer folks to people who DO understand these issues."

Do we have any actual public service librarians, especially from 
public libraries who care to comment on the foregoing grand assertion 
as well as the one about youth (for which those who are involved with 
youth services should be able to help)?  Do we have any faculty in 
states such as Florida (USF, or FSU) or Arizona who care to comment 
on such things, given the reality of older people in their states?

Assertions of these kinds cause me to wonder, of course, if there is 
any substantive empirical  evidence for them?  In my own many years 
of involvement in libraries of several kinds, it seems to me that for 
every anecdote of librarians being non-responsive, there are also 
anecdotes for them being just the opposite--extraordinarily 
responsive to people's needs.  Also, my own observation is that 
"Libraries" don't answer questions, but rather librarians do so.

Assertions have also over the years caused me to ponder more than 
once  whether the LIS professoriate may itself be sometimes out of 
touch with many aspects of actual library service.

One anecdote from my own life pointed in that direction.  I taught 
cataloging for years, but once (in the early 90s) when I asked a 
school librarian if I could bring my cataloging class to her library 
to work on her non-book, non-print media collection for cataloging, 
she agreed, but required me to come to her library by myself for an 
entire day, and simply sit there and observe what was going on--how 
the young who came into it used the library and so on and so 
forth.  I think she strongly suspected that my pre-occupation with 
cataloging and other faculty duties simply gave me little sense of 
the reality of her everyday work situation.  Well, I did the day of 
observation, and...

I was stunned!  By the end of the day,  I had not only observed many 
spectacular services and activities that took place, but ended up 
with several pages of notes consisting of research ideas that could 
have been conducted with the school library at its focus--almost all 
of it in terms of what we call "information use patterns."  So much 
for my own pre-conceptions (most of them uninformed) of what the 
library did with its resources and my own easy conclusions that the 
library (i.e., its personnel) was not a very useful or enervating 
place, maybe only a boring and non-responsive place.

Fran Miksa
Professor Emeritus
School of Information
The University of Texas at Austin