The sages of electronic information delivery once predicted the age of the paperless office. It never happened, for two reasons. First, people were too comfortable with the tangibility of paper to give it up. Second, people were so uncomfortable with the mass of information the electronics delivered, they used even more paper to sort through it all.

Those same sages also predicted the demise of the career librarian. Electronic information delivery will render human assistance unnecessary, they said. Computers can do tomorrow what librarians do today--better, faster, and cheaper, too!

Happily, the sages are batting 0-2. A new book, the Reference Library Use: ...