What gives? Is it just because this is all so cool and future-y that we bend over and take our lashes like good little co-dependent gate-keepers? I guess we haven’t learned our lessons yet.

This term we’re trying something a little new. It’ll probably be a little trickier for us, but we’re hoping that it works better for faculty and students. This term we’re reorganizing our reference desk shifts to match up with the class schedule. This means that some shifts start at odd times (like 12:20 or 1:40), which will be at odds with meetings we have with other staff both here and at St. Olaf but which might make it easier for students and faculty to look at our schedules and see where our free time matches with theirs, and it might make it easier for us to visit classes without finding desk subs for 20 minutes or half an hour of our shifts.

Or it could end up just being a pain in the neck. But figuring that out is what pilot projects are all about, right?

Now, as with any transition, some things still need some work (by which I mean nearly all of our “general” guides, which will get updated as time allows, and certainly before Winter term), but the meat of it is done. And making the transition gave us all a wonderful oportunity to think carefully about the purpose of our guides, redesign most of them, spark renewed interest with our faculty, and talk amongst ourselves about each of our tips and tricks for making research guides as useful as possible.

As soon as our MetaLib upgrade happens, we’ll also start peppering these guides with highly customized search boxes… but doing that before the upgrade will just be an exercise in frustration, so we’re holding off. That’s another whole story and set of headaches…

But for now, the message is: Yay! GouldGuides!!! So excited!!!!!

And then I waited a couple more weeks.

And then I set to work making my own.

As it turns out, EndNote may have stalled because the new MLA style requires a field that isn’t built into EndNote yet. Every single bibliographic citation in the new MLA style requires that you note the medium of publication. So “Print” for things published on paper, and “Web” for things published on the web, and so on. (Here’s an overview of the new stuff in this edition.) Well, EndNote doesn’t have a field for people to say what medium they’re looking at when they create a new citation. After much experimentation, I co-opted the “Label” field for this purpose, but I can see why EndNote was reluctant to do that. Labels are really supposed to be used for other things… hopefully things that my lit majors won’t need too much, but we’ll have to see.

Two other annoying things about this field are that there will be no way to populate them automatically with the other bibliographic imports from our databases (there’s just no way the database will know if the researcher ultimately sees a print or web version) and that it’s far, far down the field list in an EndNote record, so there’s a lot of annoying scrolling involved for every citation.

These drawbacks aside, I have a draft style that I’m willing to share (zip file). It’s definitely still a draft, so help with testing and troubleshooting is much appreciated.

Here’s what it looks like:

(From my French & Francophone Studies Research Guide)

Frankly, I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me until today, but now that it has, I look forward to seeing if I get any increased traffic. (Of course, the other part of me is asking if I really want increased traffic… but of course, the answer is always yes.)

Point of need research assistance: the holy grail of every research services department.

As I was experimenting with new sources and concocting tips for the students who will soon be using them, copying and pasting relevant chunks from other guides, and then deleting about a third of the information after realizing I’d needed it to wrap my head around the project, but my students probably didn’t need it… as my guide emerged little by little throughout the day, I mused on the changing role these guides are having in my professional life, and on their convoluted lifespan.

Before going further, a word of explanation. At our library we have three kinds of guides: subject guides, course guides, and general guides. General guides are those things that aren’t specific to a discipline at all (like “Using the Library from Off Campus“). Subject guides serve as portals for research within a major, and there’s at least one for every major on campus. Each liaison maintains the subject guides for his or her liaison departments, and we each have the option to create a course guide for any course we think needs one.

Recently, I’ve begun rethinking my guides. It started last year when I changed almost all of them over from being organized around types of sources (finding articles, finding books, etc.) to being organized around topics or tasks (finding primary sources, finding social/historical context, finding authoritative scores etc.). Now this year, I’m using the subject guides more and more while I’m at the reference desk, both to organize my own thoughts about a new topic and, more importantly, to model this behavior for students. After all, it’s probably much more useful to send students the extra click through a subject guide than to force them to sink or swim in a list of 200 or more research databases! This also keeps me honest, because I actually use the guides all the time, so their faults scream out at me until I finally get time to remedy them.

And in my life, I do my most careful thinking when creating course guides. These grow out of a specific research task and force me to really come to grips with the research challenges inherent to that task. Then, at the end of each term, I retire the term’s course guides but copy and paste the best bits into the subject guide for the appropriate major. Next term, as I create new guides, some chunks can be copied straight out of the subject guide, but there’s always something new, or some sections that just aren’t appropriate for the larger guide, so those get built from scratch almost every time.

And so this circular evolution of course guide to subject guide and back again keeps me writing and updating guides pretty much every week of the year.

p.s. For the curious, today I was working on a guide to Medieval and Renaissance Music (link will be live through March 2008, after which point it’ll be archived offline).

Now there is a lot of stuff and people can find it or they can find something. There are lots of ways to get help. Traditional reference is not going to work. [Mr. Janes is exceptionally humorous, but he is right. Traditional reference is not going to serve the needs of our users.]

I wasn’t at that conference, and I’m not even directly responding to this passage. But this is a refrain I hear over and over among librarians, and every time I hear it, I think I must have missed something. I assume that “face to face” is implied by this form of reference, as well as “reference interview” and some form of question-resolving activity. And some form of these ingredients continues to make up a major portion of my work. Maybe the problem is that I’ve only been a reference librarian for almost 3 years. Maybe I never experienced this “traditional” form of my job that everyone thinks is breathing its last gasps.

But if we envision our service as one which helps students understand how to tackle questions and why tackling them in particular ways is might be important, is this “traditional” reference or something different? And if we notice growing numbers of students coming to us for this kind of help at the desk and in our offices, and if we’re hearing that students are coming to us because their professors or their roommates or their best friends suggested it, wouldn’t that mean that these services are, in fact, serving their needs?

The kinds of questions we get, and the way that students approach us leads me to believe that reference is not dead or even dying.* I think reference is alive and well just like the English language is alive and well. It isn’t bound by the same rules and expectations as it was once, and new rules have emerged over time, but that doesn’t mean that the basics have fundamentally shifted or become irrelevant. Rather than being gatekeepers of information, we’re now expert in weeding through too much information, but we’re still helping people fill their information needs. We’ve added new methods of communication over time (I imagine telephone reference was at one time regarded as new), but we’re still in the business of communicating with people to figure out what they need.

So if by “traditional reference” you mean “a service which requires people to approach a desk and ask a librarian a question, face to face, as their only method of posing a question, and a service which will respond to these questions by handing back factual answers,” then yes, I think that kind of service is has evolved and been subsumed into a much broader service. But it does not necessarily follow that desks, physical spaces, or even librarians are obsolete. These are just the tools, and only a subset of the tools available to us now; any tool can be put to good or bad use. The service that makes use of these tools is the key. And that service reinvents itself every time a new person presents us with a question, every time we work together to figure out how best to resolve the question, and every time present strategies and tips and, yes, even answers in a way that makes sense to for that question at that time in that context.

—–

* Of course, it may just be that my particular circumstances and community keep reference a vital part of what I do. As students here have grown to rely on the other two prongs of our service (instruction and individual appointments), we’ve noticed that they bring more and more “long” questions to the reference desk. They’re perfectly able to find many of the answers to fact-based questions on their own (which is why our “short” question total has diminished over time), but they come to the desk for in-depth help, research strategy development, or just plain old help getting started in an unfamiliar research territory. I’ve also already talked about why our particular library benefits from a centralized location where a librarian can be found at predictable hours and how we supplement that service with our appointment model and with a low-key IM reference service. But these are outgrowths of our particular institution and our students’ culture, so I understand that generalization is difficult in practice, however wonderful in theory.

But first, the background. Our writing center contacts professors who will be teaching WR (“writing rich”) courses across the curriculum to see if these professors would like a writing assistant assigned specifically to their classes. So, for example, a bunch of English courses and a handful of sociology/anthropology, PoliSci, and History classes promise to provide their students with a portion of the intensive writing experience that’s required for graduation. And professors teaching these courses have the option of working closely with a single writing assistant who will shepherd enrolled students through all the writing assignments.

Well, last year the director of the our writing center and I began scheming ways to make our two operations work together more closely. I attended a writing professionals’ mini-conference with her. She invited me to start training new writing assistants. And this winter we’re taking it a step further.

She provided me with a list of courses that have a writing assistant assigned to them. Each week at our departmental meeting, I’ll check with the other librarians to see if they’ve been asked to work with any of these WR courses. If they have, they will contact the writing assistant for those courses in invite the assistants to the library session. That way the writing assistant will understand the research process and options when working with each of the enrolled students. They’ll also be encouraged to send students our way when they read drafts.

I’m going to choose one course to take this set-up one step further, just to see how it goes. I’m going to have one writing assistant take down the names of student that could use a librarian’s help and (with the students’ permission, of course) hand that list over to me. I’ll then initiate the contact with the students. I’m curious to see if overcoming that initial shyness of approaching a librarian for help makes a significant difference. On the other hand, I’m a little worried that this might be more of a workload than we can handle. Hence the pilot within a pilot… and zero publicity. It’ll just be between me and my writing assistant (and a few thousand of my closest internet buddies).

So today I got the list of courses and their corresponding assistants and spent some time creating a new section of the Moodle space we use to collaborate within my department. Hopefully with courses listed, contact information easily at hand, and spaces for noting our impressions of the process we can keep this thing moving forward smoothly and effectively. Goodness knows that if the process isn’t as easy as falling off a log by the time classes start (tomorrow, by the way), the scheme will never fly.

Wish us luck!

I can easily envision this on the library site. We could be logged into meebo and hanging out in the room in case anyone had a question. This would alleviate a problem we’ve been facing: how to make it easy for students to ask IM questions even though we all have separate IM addresses and are not considering having a single “reference” account that we’d all log in and out of. And yet, students could ask questions without having an IM account. Perfect.

Except… We’d have to figure out what to do about the fact that anybody looking at the embedded room could see the questions we were working through, and anyone who logs in can see the last 50 or so lines of chat history. I’m the least privacy-concerned librarian I know, but even I think we’d have to have a warning about this posted prominently.

And then there are the ads. Every so often we are asked to “please enjoy this sponsored video,” which stinks. We could turn the media area off, I guess, but that seems like a kill-joy.

I can also not choose any options other than “only You can add video” and “anyone can add video.” I’d like to be able to authorize people to push video out onto the library site… just cuz I work on a college campus with, you know, college students.

But I’m still thinking we might be able to make this work. I’d love to make this work. Even if we only do the text part of it at first and save the cool media-pushing-thingy for later.

[Update 5/16/2007: I've embedded a few sample reference chat room configurations here. One cool thing is that people can copy the code for the room and paste it where ever they'd like, so they could easily add it to their own pages and have us right there in their own space if they wanted. The magic happens if you click "Copy Chat Room."]

Now I’m not saying that it’s bad for students to go to the person most suited to answer their questions. Far from it. But I remember being too intimidated to figure out who the people were who could answer my basic questions when I was a pre-major, let alone re-figure for each class.

But what if each freshman were assigned a librarian at the same time that they’re assigned a faculty adviser. This librarian could be “their” librarian who could do anything from answer basic questions to directing them (and personally introducing them) to the liaison most suited to answer specific questions.

Here’s the major hitch in my plan: 500 freshmen… 7 librarians… Not a good ratio, especially if any of them still needed their personal library adviser by the time they got to sophomore year. We could end up with as many as 1000 students per librarian, plus our students who have already declared majors.

Of course, many students wouldn’t sit down with us more than once (and they’d only come that once if we required it). So it might not be that much more work. And it might be a nice way to personalize the library.

I just don’t know. It was an interesting thought, if nothing else.