I spent a good part of today trying to wrap my brain around a new subject area so that I could a) figure out which resources might be important for the assignment, b) figure out if we had access to those resources, c) figure out what to substitute for the stuff we didn’t have, d) create an online research guide for that assignment, and ultimately e) stand up in front of that class on Wednesday and say coherent and useful things rather than idiotic and generally boring things.

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).

I’ve been mulling over this question for the last couple of years, but I returned to it after reading these conference notes posted at A Wandering Eyre. (I know, I know, that was months ago. But I’ve been mulling, remember?) In particular, there were a couple of lines in those notes where “Jane” paraphrased Joe Janes and then added her own commentary in brackets.

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.

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* 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.

Walking in to work this morning, musing on staffing and service models for liaison librarians and fumbling for my keys with mitten-encased hands, I decided that our liaison model is doing just about precisely half of what it could do (time, money, and staffing aside). Currently, there is a liaison for each major on campus. Freshmen and Sophomores are encouraged to meet with the liaisons as well, but before they declare a major they may have to figure out new people for every class they take.

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.