Joe James, Reference 2.0
“Be Confident in what you already know about Reference” – Want to poke at this idea.
Academic: Someone who would face the apocalypse with a historical overview.
Samuel Green: Primary purpose for helping people find information is because there is too much information and people can’t find what they are looking for. (1876) Librarians should step in and help people find information.
Special, Public, and Academic libraries followed with Academic libraries being the last to follow (no reference desks in academic libraries pre-1910)
Reference manifests itself in different ways in different settings.
In 2007, there IS a lot of stuff and people can find it, or find something, and there are ways to get help.
Traditional Reference Librarianship is not going to work.
We have to change the way we think about and conceptionalize reference work.
It is worth assuming that everything eventually will be in digital form. Google book’s ultimate goal is to have all the books. Everything will be in digital format with very different ways to search this information.
Followed by horizontal/federated searching: with every way to get to things: chapter, paragraph, stanza, lyric, image, etc. Increasing we’ll be looking for parts & wholes with everything increasingly digital.
James Wire: “they will choke and die in front of you before they tell you what they want”. (1930)
How do we insert reference into this world?
Blogs, Wikis and Podcasts are a part of this. (Change Wikipedia if you don’t like it!)
Niches where what we do can shines:
- We are made for depth, for authority, people who care or can be made to care.
- Some people who prefer to be helped.
Google helps millions of people every day, we couldn’t do that if we wanted to – and do we even want to? Provide high quality service to the types of people you can provide service to: they will love you and spread the word about how great you are.
We have done this before – We have offered reference in different ways based on what people want. You don’t do a 40-minute reference interview for someone who wants to know the capital of Bolivia!
Impulse: We just want to be heard – sits in every library we have, the music, the poem, the books, everything boils down to this. Social Network tools such as Facebook are the modern equivalent of sitting around the campfire: It’s sharing our voice and saying we’re here.
If this is the environment that around half of our communities are living in we have to live there too.
The interesting thing about Second Life is that it is about creation. If we can help people make their creative works more useable we are doing good work.
Every library should be somewhere and everywhere both inside and outside the library: this is the concept of the library leaking out of the building. In most cases this is much stronger than the physical presence of the library.
Concept of a library is anytime anyone interacts with your stuff:
When they’re asking a question online
When they’re searching a database
When they’re in the catalog
When they’re on your website
We can tell easily how many users come into our library but probably have no idea how many people visit to our website. Go home and count and say ‘we’ve doubled our useage’ we’d like more money!
FAQs are reference work: people helping each other. In this increasingly digital world, people are helping each other – far more intertwined and personal than people who come in and ask a reference question.
Now we’re seeing segmentation in our population:
People who are into quality, who are diving for more, when they are willing and able to wait, this is when we do reference as we used to do it – better than we used to do it, because now we have digital: For the moment, print is our secret weapon that we should tell people about!
Put reference in the circulating collection: As the years go by, print is less of a strategic point.
(1909) “Method over material”: Stuff doesn’t matter as much as how you engage them.
Transitory Search Questions: For people who are in chat rooms, and so forth – move them forward. Give them a search tip, help them with a source, and so forth.
Participate in the digital world – be a role model, be useful: we need best practices for how to do this.
(1944) Market yourself as a time saver! Margaret Hutcheonson (??)
People think of us in a small pigeonhole and if we present ourselves in a small pigeonhole they get one note. We have chords; scales; symphonies to give them so play that complete melody so they can hear it.
Whatever we do online should be better than what we do in person – it’s got to be more compelling, more efficient, because they can leave more quickly than those who walk into the building!
Do be confident in what we do; but do not be complacent. We will see more and better opportunities for us to provide better service, provide better quality, and be better as professionals.
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