Reference Services

First of all, I want to say that I was a bit surprised by the topics of the readings this week. I had originally thought that the week's focus would be on collection development for two reason: one, we were told in the first week of class that we would cover collection development the week after we did our collection development exercise, and two, with Cat Smith as the guest lecturer, I naturally assumed that she would talk about collection development, since she teaches that class. I could see the connection in that Cat also teaches 451, but I really don't feel like I have closure on my collection development exercise.

With that being said, I suppose I have to talk about reference services (user-centered services), as that's what the readings focused on. I'm mostly going to ignore the Enola Gay article, because it was largely disconnected from the other articles that we read this week. The one correlation I can draw between it and libraries is the desire for censorship by some of the public, and the long-standing tradition of librarians to preserve freedom of speech. Librarians would most certainly want to display the Enola Gay, because it's information, but I'm not sure how they would feel about the "speech" that was written to go along with the display.

Anyway, reference services. I mostly want to focus on Morris's article, because there was a section the "Reference Interview" that stood out to me. First of all, from 451 last year, I remember reading an article in one of the first weeks of class entitled "The Myth of the Reference Interview". I had no idea what a reference interview was at the time, but I quickly discovered that there is a long-standing tradition in libraries of trying to teach about the "reference interview", a scripted, often very long, interview that the reference librarian conducts before trying to find the information that the patron wanted. In short, the interview is highly inappropriate for most reference interactions and is rarely used in practice. At one point, there was some reasoning behind the reference interview, such as when you're trying to find high-level references, such as when someone is trying to write his or her dissertation (still a valid use of the reference interview today), or the fact that the cost of searching was exceedingly high. Reference librarians would narrow down the searcher's topic as much as possible, so that they were querying the database as few times as possible, thus saving the library's time and money. Nowadays, however, database searching is much cheaper, and is rarely limited by either amount downloaded or time spent using the database, effectively eliminating the argument of cost from the equation (ignoring the cost of employing the reference librarian). Second, the reference interview is really only useful for in-depth queries. Typically the patron is either going to ask a simple question ("ready-reference", as it was called once upon a time, such as a state capital or some other factoid-type question) or ask for general information on a topic. Most reference questions, from what I've been told, are for school projects or for medical topics, which generally means that these questions do not go nearly as in-depth as the reference interview would require the librarian to go.

So how does all of this tie into user-centered services? Quite simply: users don't want to spend an hour with the reference librarian, going through a formal reference interview, just to get information for a 500-word school paper or to find out the capital of Arizona. A user-centered service would only involve asking the patrons enough questions to find out what they want to know, and also guiding the choice of subsequent questions by the patron's responses, rather than following a scripted interview. User-centered: gauge what your patron wants. Most likely, it doesn't involve a long, drawn-out reference interview.