Jo Bell Whitlatch

Jo Bell Whitlatch has worked in three academic libraries in many areas, including collection management, acquisitions, cataloging, circulation, reference, interlibrary loan, and library management. She has also taught at San Jose State University’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science, and she is a past president of the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA). Her research interests and areas of special competence are information-seeking needs and behavior, user studies in libraries, the evaluation of service organizations, and the management of academic libraries. Her publications include two books, The Role of the Academic Reference Librarian (1990) and Evaluating Reference Services (2000), and articles in Reference & User Services Quarterly, College & Research Libraries, Journal of Academic Librarianship, and The Reference Librarian. She has a Ph.D. in library and information studies and an M.A. in Asian studies from the University of California at Berkeley.