il2007 Keynote: Reference as we know it is gone. and it’s not coming back.

Joe Janes, University of Washington

no slides — slide free is a good thing. Thanks, Joe!

Opens up with a great idea: For those librarians who want things to stay the way they were, who don’t want to embrace technology and the digital environment, let’s have a session at ALA, title it something like, “remember the good ol’ days” or “let’s celebrate the NUC” – and then lock them up. and take them away….he stands before us as a person born to be a ready reference librarian, and he gets it, but it’s kind of over.

What is our purpose? Originally, we were tasked because there was too much information and people could not find what they were looking for. It is a notion of helping people, and it is still our notion. but are methods, our practice, our environment is not the same.

Now, there is a lot of information and people CAN find it, at least they can find something. And there are lots of places to get help. Because of these facts, traditional librarianship is not going to work.

(aside: pre-1910 there is no reference in the academic library, the purpose of the students was to learn how to use the information. librarians were for collection development/management)

GoogleBooks goal – to digitize all the books. every book ever, in all languages, from all continents. Everything will be digital at some point and that point is fast approaching.

horizontal searching - we are horizontal information consumers of digital information that we can access at granular levels. wholes and parts of all things always. and lots of them, simultaneously, and that’s how we like it.

James Wire, 1930 – description of the ref interview – in a chapter entitled reference as mind reading, he states that library users “will choke and die in front of you before they tell you what they want.”

Don’t whine about Wikipedia unless you’re doing something to change it. Don’t whine about Google because they are doing the job that we couldn’t do even if we wanted to (serve a billion people a day) and they’re doing it better than we could even if we could do it. So what’s left for us? a lot.

We have niches:

• deep divers: librarians are built for people who care or who can be made to care about particulars of information (the deep divers)
• there are people who prefer to be helped — the old time library regulars — but in the digital environment, they don’t know we are there.

Don’t try to duplicate the services of the keyword search engine. If you do, you’re slitting your own throat. Niches can be thought of as a diminishing or a focusing. I’m more likely to think of it as a focusing, as a positive thing.

Broader doesn’t have to mean shallower, it can mean richer. and it really boils down to an urge to be heard, to make an imprint. there is no end point to our new participatory information environment. part of the outcome is the participation. part of the outcome is the process.

If there are many of our users that are in online environments, then we need to be there, too. We need to help them make these digital environments and systems more usable (ex. second life – it’s all about creating things, if we can get librarianship into that world to help them make their creative works more usable).

Here’s what we need to do: get out of the library – and stay in the library. be somewhere and everywhere. every library needs to be somewhere and everywhere.

somewhere - place for story hour, study rooms, aa meetings, you need to be a community meeting place and a social space.

everywhere – web presence, outreach, in the spaces of our users lives. the concept of the library leaks out of the building. the concept of the library is sooo much bigger than the place. the only reason we have a place is because the stuff was physical. it’s not physical anymore.

biggest scandal in librarianship – we are not quantifying the use of our digital resources. Guaranteed: you have doubled your usage of electronic resources and you are not getting any money to support it and that is suicide. these numbers demand money to support it.

there is a segmentation of our population that we need to recognize and serve accordingly: -

1. for the people who are diving deep, who are into info and quality research, that is when we shine.
   • an aside – what do we do about print? currently print is our secret weapon, for the moment, but as the years go by it becomes less of a strategic advantage. the role of print will steadily decrease. put the reference books in the circulating collection. It might sting a little, but you’ll get over it. stuff doesn’t matter. good reference services is, after all, measured by “method over material.” (mudge, 1909)
2. 2. horizontal scanners – just move them forward, give them a budge, a tip, etc. transitory, brief encounters is what we should focus on.

On new librarians and veteran librarians -- need to work together to get this done. New librarians are really frustrated and they are right to be. (see first statement), but older librarians have things to offer, too.

our message needs to be that librarians help busy people save time and money (margaret hutchins, 1944). but people only hear one note from us (books, story hour). We have chords, but they don’t hear them. People ask for books from us, because they think that’s all we have.

Whatever services we provide to people online need to be better than what we provide in person. if they’re walking in the door, they’ve made the commitment. They’ve driven, they’ve parked, they know we exist and they are a user. By contrast, online users will leave us in a second. and this is where people live. We are getting more hits to our web site than we are getting visits to our physical space and we are turning them off. We are alienating more users every day than are visiting our physical buildings in a month.

We have to be better than that.