The purpose of this article is to take a look into the past twenty years and to evaluate the changes in the organization of the library and the information function during this time period. Academic and special libraries are the ones that have made an impressive progress and innovations to keep pace with a changing environment. New technologies and ideas have brought strong supporters of offering various specialized information services to the library users. The different approaches and experiments to better perform this professional role in the library and in turn, the efforts in the educational institutions to meet the challenges were reviewed through the literature. Much of the literature available regarding the reference and information function deals mainly with the trends in the u. s. libraries. The implications of these trends to Korean libraries and library education are sought in view of our social, economic, and educational circumstances as well as our user behavior.