This paper discusses the strengths and weaknesses of patrons and reference librarians as sources of data for the evaluation of reference question-answering effectiveness, along with ways to enhance the usefulness of data from each source. It describes the Wisconsin-Ohio Reference Evaluation Program and discusses some illustrative statistics from the project, including data on relationships between patron-perceived answering success and factors such as staffing patterns, effort spent on answering questions, types and sources of questions, and collection size.
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