The goal of this project is to honor and celebrate the lives of reference and information services librarians and to increase both knowledge and appreciation of reference services worldwide. Initiated by the Reference & Information Services Section of the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA), this project is the culmination of two years' worth of effort. In collaboration with students from the graduate library program at Rutgers University in New Jersey in addition to other library schools throughout the United States, reference librarians were interviewed from eleven different countries. Yongheng Zhong, the librarian of Wuhan Branch Library, is the project coordinator of China.

Within these eleven different countries are eleven different libraries, each with their own unique culture of reference practices. These stories come from the souls of individual reference and information librarians. Collectively, they make up the very core of reference services - a concept within librarianship that is still not practiced in some parts of the world, which have sparked the initiative to promote the worldwide development and provision of reference services in the 21st Century.