Posted by: plinius on: oktober 9, 2006
Sink, swim or surf : the future of reference work in Norwegian public libraries / In Beaulieu, Micheline ; Davenport, Elisabeth ; Pors, Niels Ole. Library and information studies : Research and professional practice. London : Taylor Graham, 1997, p. 44-60.
Catalogues or customers
Traditionally, libraries have distinguished between internal, or preparatory operations, which deal with the accession and description of library materials; and external, or public directed operations, which deliver the materials, or provide the answers, that the users demand.
Both functions are, of course, essential to the work of the library. In the profession there has, however, been a tendency to value the “internal” tasks of cataloguing, classification and indexing more highly than the “external” tasks of dissemination and reference work. The physical – or digital – catalogue has, in particular, been seen as the core technology of the library, and as the ultimate test of the librarian`s professional skills.
Vast resources are invested in describing documents. The intellectual and clerical work involved in cataloguing is both time-consuming and mentally demanding. Rough calculations suggest that integrating a new book into a collection costs – on the average – as much as the book itself. The profession is continually updating its descriptive procedures (AACR, Dewey, LCSH, …) and its systems for sharing descriptive information (MARC, union catalogues, networked databases). One may argue that the systems themselves, because of great advances in our understanding of modelling or representation, need to be reconstructed along new lines. But few doubt that resource description will remain a prominent part of the librarian` s professional role.
Reference work, by contrast, is much less professionalized or codified. Reference service is still seen as a central component in the work of libraries. Librarians are trained, and often very well trained, in the practical art of reference. But this centrality has not been translated into highly developed networks, rules, or theories. In public libraries, reference has remained a small scale, localized craft – very different from the mighty institutions that underpin document description and the catalogue. And here I agree with the Norwegian Director of Public Libraries, who recently stated: generally we know too little about what libraries do. In our professional debate we have been very occupied with the tools, and much less with the user. (Langeland, 1995, p. 37).
Librarians or documentalists
Why is this so? Why did the inner work of document organization achieve higher professional status than the outer work of responding to the queries of library customers? We can at least state that there is a certain tension between those who emphasize the role of the catalogue and those who emphasize the role of customer service. In her Ph.D. thesis Lena Olsson (1995) describes in fascinating detail the decade-long struggle between catalogue-oriented librarians and customer-oriented documentalists in the design and building of Sweden`s first automated national catalogue LIBRIS. The tug of war went to the heart of the profession.
Documentalists and special librarians followed the scientific practices of the technical and medical colleges while the generalists followed the humanistic tradition of cultivating the individual. The documentalists tried to focus on information content in, e.g., journal articles, and to utilize modern methods of information transfer. Thus they turned away from the traditional library, while the librarians remained attached to the library as a particular space and to the organizing and describing of monographs. The struggle of the documentalists was a first step towards abstracting library from book to information (p. 233-234, my translation).
This particular struggle involved the great research libraries rather than the public library sector. The academic libraries are institutions of scholarly learning rather than institutes of popular education. They carry the weight of centuries, while the public libraries are much more recent. But the polarity is the same, and has to do with the nature of the relationship between libraries and customers.
All librarians agree that libraries exist in order to serve a public, be they scholars, students, or the general crowd. All librarians agree that individual customers should be served with warmth, diligence and skill. These norms are not always realized in library practice, but they are realized more often than not. My personal experience of the library world is very positive, and is confirmed by numerous surveys of library users: individual librarians are generally courteous, amiable and helpful beyond the call of duty.
But the customer orientation has not been implemented at the structural level. While most librarians are user-friendly, most library systems are not. The inner world of librarianship – as symbolized by the catalogue – is ruled by the profession. Librarians would prefer to adapt the users to the systems – which means user education – rather than adapting the systems to the users. And here there is no great difference between public and professional, libraries. The LIBRIS struggle had to do with systems design – or the infrastructure of customer service. And at the level of design, librarians have not been overly user-oriented – at least not towards current users.
The traditional card catalogue emerged as a tool of scholarly humanistic research. It served the needs of research communities focused on the intense study of books. And the scholar`s catalogue maintained its dominance at the centre of the profession even while other groups of users appeared. The more technical professions – by which I mean science, technology and medicine – had much more need of current journal articles and reports. The social sciences required a combination of classical books, professional articles and current sources of social information. What the business world really wanted to know was the future, but it had to settle for news items and strategic analyses. And the general public – more often than not – asked for entertainment – and was offered edification …
The professional publics had sufficient purchasing power to organize their own technical libraries and documentation centers. They were able to build alternative information institutions, uncumbered by visions of Greek pillars and grandiose catalogues. The British Library Lending Division at Boston Spa – which was bulldozed through by a chemical engineer; United Microfilms International – originaly constructed around the technologies of xeroxing and microfilm; and the Institute for Scientific Information in Philadelphia – created by the formidable Mr. Garfield, are information institutions designed with today`s customers in mind. From Norway, I would like to add the National Library division in Rana – a former steel mill town on the West coast – where several hundred employees – led by a former politician without library training – are storing, cataloguing, microfilming, and digitalizing the full range of recordable media published in Norway.
The general public had no comparable way of channelling its interests and concerns. As a general rule, organizations develop most rapidly if they are challenged from the outside – by customers or competitors. Public libraries have not faced an organized public, and are unaccustomed to the give-and-take of strong debate. Libraries are, in any case, best known for their reading and lending facilities. To the general public, reference service remains the least known and most obscure component of library work.
This is beginning to change, however – mainly because our public libraries are becoming more important as educational institutions. The number of external students in higher education is growing, new teaching plans stress independent, resource-based study, and local libraries are seen as vital in the coming, major reform of adult education. During 1992-1996 a large-scale project was carried out in order to improve the quality – and also the visibility – of reference in Norwegian public libraries. And the results surprised the library community.
Reference quality
Information was gathered, as in many similar British and US studies, by simulating an ordinary user. In a survey of 49 public libraries in 1993, a set of reference questions of medium difficulty were presented to the reference desk. In all cases the staff faced a pleasant middle-aged lady who had five questions about whaling and one about hunting:
Since I am here anyhow, I wondered whether it is legal to shoot badgers, and if so – when? My parents have been sorely disturbed by a badger in the garden the whole summer and in the autumn as well. The animal opens the garbage bin and spreads garbage all around.
The overall conclusion was dismal: the chance of getting a satisfactory answer was less than 30% (Salvesen, 1994). The last question caught people`s attention – perhaps because wrong answers could lead to unpleasant encounters with the law – so the final report was nicknamed the Badger Report. The correct answer, if you are so inclined, is that you may shoot Norwegian badgers with impunity throughout the autumn – in fact from August 28 and January 31.
This project was inspired by a Danish student project carried out in 1984 and published in 1987 (Elkær Hansen, 1987). It prompted, in its turn, a Swedish study using the same methodology. Neither of these studies, in three Scandinavian countries with strong public library traditions, were encouraging to those who promote the library as a community information centre.
The percentages lie well below the international “norm”: that libraries both public and academic tend to have a success rate around 55%. In the US, observations in the 50-60% interval have occurred so frequently that researchers speak of a “fifty-five percent rule”. It is worth stressing that academic libraries are no exception – though the number of surveys is limited. With this in mind, we should probably be happy libraries do not run airlines…
Library responses
Quality testing has no meaning unless it leads to quality improvement. The library school teacher who supervised the 1984 study, reported that the Danish library community was shocked by the findings – but did not act on them (Johannsen, 1994). Reference quality was defined as a problem for the staff of the reading room – not as a concern of the leadership or the organization as a whole. But he adds that “today, the situation has changed in comparison with the mid-eighties. There is more focus on users and user needs”.
The Norwegian library community was equally shocked. The project was the first professional, large-scale empirical study of service quality in Norway – and the results were hard to disregard. Some argued, however, that the staff on duty might have been library assistants rather than librarians proper. A follow-up study of staffing routines revealed that this was not the case. In the libraries studied the reference desk was normally staffed by professional librarians rather than assistants (Salvesen, 1996).
The authors of the badger report concluded that the quality of reference service in Norwegian public libraries is not professionally acceptable. This applies to the provision of simple factual answers, or ready reference. But there is little reason to believe that other types of reference work would have fared any better.
Our confidential customer also took notes on the more qualitative aspects of service behavior. These have not been systematically analyzed. But the information does say more about reference behavior in general – and points to areas where quality improvement might be possible.
As in Denmark the study showed great differences between libraries. In some places that staff would do anything to help us. In other libraries we felt like intruders.…
Service quality was not highly correlated with size or resources. In busy libraries, staff might do their utmost. In quiet libraries, interest in the customer could still be low.
We have the strong impression that very few utilized the reference interview in order to plan an efficient search. Only one library asked us why we needed the information, and nobody asked whether we knew foreign languages. Reference works in English were automatically offered.
The lack of professional reference interviewing was also notable in a Scottish study, carried out by students from Aberdeen (Head, 1993). Fifteen libraries were approached with the same question – about the Scottish author and traveler Sir Ranulph Fiennes, who had just crossed the Antarctica on foot and unsupported.. Only one library tried to conduct an interview. As in Norway, the librarians showed no interest in the customer`s situation. They charged into reference action without knowing the intended use of the information, the user`s level of education, or the user`s previous knowledge about the topic.
In Norway, the immediate reaction of the Director of Public Libraries was the following: I will not conclude that quality was poor, because quality must be measured against the expectations of the public. There are probably few people who expect to get answers to this type of question in public libraries. … I believe that the public never will ask many questions of this nature. Answering such questions does not become part of the routine, at least not in small and medium-sized libraries. And many find it difficult to tackle problems outside their daily routines
Which may well be the case. But Langeland (1994) also stated that reference work is one of the core functions of the public library. Libraries should be able to tackle uncommon questions. But smaller libraries would need the support of larger central libraries – with more information resources – and a greater range of questions in their daily work. Norwegian public libraries need, in other words, a second line reference service.
One of the more impressive efforts to raise reference quality in recent years comes from Maryland, USA. Here, the Division of Library Development and Services (under the local Department of Education) tested sixty public libraries in 1983. The 55%-rule was fully confirmed (Dyson, 1992). They also determined that the main causal factor was communication. Collection size, staff size, time pressure and the amount of time spent on each query had hardly any influence on the quality of the answer.
Library authorities in Maryland developed a three day communication training course and trained more than two hundred of their reference librarians. A follow-up study showed that librarians who had attended the course got substantially better reference results than non-attenders (Larson, 1994).
Reports from the field
Challenged by the badger report, and inspired by Maryland, I developed a two day training course in reference interviewing in 1994. This course has now been conducted six times, with approximately eighty participants – mainly women – in various regions of Norway. Both librarians and library assistants have attended.
In the workshops I could recognize many of the problems identified by Scandinavian, British and US researchers. The participants did have a tendency to rush into action – and to take a leading rather than a guiding role in the search process. They did need to consider communication as a set of professional skills rather than an idiosyncratic personal attribute. And they definitely needed to explore the context of many queries more fully than they were accustomed to. But my experience has also been that improved interviewing techniques, while valuable and important, are far from being the whole answer.
Crowd control
Beyond the reference interview as such, participants brought up three main barriers to efficient reference work. The first was how to handle the “difficult” customer – which shaded into the more general problem of dealing with several competing customers at the same time. Parents with small children will know what I mean.
We used socio-drama techniques to explore these problems – which I would call issues of customer management or crowd control. Participants worked together in small groups and designed a typical real-life scenario. Each group role-played its scenario in front of the others. We then analyzed the scenario together – and replayed it with different communication strategies, in order to experience the impact of communication on the flow of events.
The grumpy lady who rejected every suggestion for a book, the lonely lady who wanted to talk rather than read, and the impatient lady who just had to be served ahead of everybody else were stock figures. The chattering teams of teenagers sent forth by their (no doubt relieved) teacher – without further instructions and no warning to the librarian – to study African politics or the natural history of earthworms, were also recognized by everybody.
The problem parameters were similar, but the solutions were not. Our follow-up discussions were often heated. Participants differed greatly in their view of what librarians could or could not do. The lack of shared practical norms was obvious. Colleagues at the same library could have very different views on acceptable behavior. Many participants found it very hard to say no to a customer. They feared to be disliked. In the terminology of the Tavistock school (or socio-technic studies), I would say that their skills in boundary maintenance were low.
Organization
The second barrier was organizational. Reference work is one of the services offered by the library as an organization. Its quality depends on the social and material organization of the library – how things are done at the collective level. Issues like
can not be resolved by training courses. They must be faced by the library leadership.
My impression is that there is much to gain – even within current budget constraints – in this area. But organizational change never comes easy. Libraries are not accustomed to take the lead in change processes. Like other stable public institutions – School, Church, Army, Railway – their organizational culture has traditionally looked towards the past and inward rather than towards the future and outward.
There are many dynamic leaders in the Norwegian library sector – and in small libraries a single leader may achieve much. But in the larger public libraries she or he must also have active support from the operational staff in order to move the organization. As the leader of Oslo Public Library – Liv Sæteren – once said: it feels like changing the course of a battle cruiser.
Money
The third barrier is economic. Change demands resources. But librarians are generally overworked and undervalued. Local governments fail to understand that public libraries are the very foundations of democracy. They contain our investment in knowledge. They are uniquely equipped to organize, retrieve and disseminate knowledge and cultural expressions. They are especially beneficial for children and youth, for parents, book readers, the unemployed, and retired people.
But for libraries to improve, politicians must first take budgetary action. If they would only focus on and invest in libraries. If only public authorities could recognize the fundamental truth that this network of memory and knowledge is as needful as nutrition and fresh air! Librarians are very eager to change, but the government – which in this case means the local government – must change first.
Such – at least – is the way the library world often talks about change. The italicized sentences above come from a pamphlet of the Norwegian Library Association (Norsk Bibliotekforening, 1993). That Norwegian public libraries often face tight budgets is undeniable. That reference services could be improved by more money, is also true.
But money in itself is no solution. The organizational structure and the cultural traditions of many public libraries work against the provision of meaningful reference services. As an illustration we may take a few words from the Scottish study, which would also apply to Norwegian reference work: the librarians, on the whole, treated their enquirers with courtesy; what they lacked was a sense that the enquirers themselves had anything to contribute to the reference process (Head, 1993, p. 7).
Identity
The problems brought up by participants, and the discussions we have conducted in training groups, point to a cluster of issues that ultimately have to do with the definition and purpose of librarianship in the public sector. What are librarians for? And what are they not for? Where are the boundaries that separate the professional from the personal, the technical from the private? What does not belong to the task of public librarian?
These are issues on which Norwegian reference librarians – as I know them – disagree. Professional reference services can only be achieved in a setting that values professionalism. To be professional means to be committed to a certain level or quality of service. This quality level can – and ought to – be made explicit. The customer has a right to know what you offer.
Perfect equality of service is hardly possible. We are mutable persons in changeable settings. But the minimum level should not depend on the mood of the day or the attractiveness of the enquirer. On the other hand, professionalism is not the same as Service Unlimited. Those who take care of everything, take good care of nothing. The librarian should know the limits of normal service. Unconditional care belongs to the world of parents, saints and lovers.
In his organizational theory, Mintzberg distinguishes between traditional (or machine) bureaucracies, where rules are external, formal and enforced from above, and professional bureaucracies, where rules are internal, ethical and enforced by one`s peers. I assume that librarians want to become professionals in the latter sense.
But when colleagues disagree on the proper conduct of librarians, and there is little effort to work through the disagreement, it is impossible to build professional communities. Single individuals may be brilliant, dedicated and deeply respected for the quality of their work. But the collective, communal and cumulative nature of professions is absent. Professionals must seek an explicit and shared understanding of their task, and work together to improve levels of service, in order to build professional communities in the modern sense.
Craft or discipline
Librarians know what librarians do. Their collective memory is vast. But our knowledge of what actually goes on in libraries is also intuitive, anecdotal and fragmented. As a social scientist, who only entered the library field full-time some five years ago, I have been surprised by the cumulative mass of information about libraries – a veritable mountain of paper – next to a molehill of hard-nosed analytical knowledge. I can not imagine any commercial provider of information services dealing with its operations in such a relaxed way.
I sense the Norwegian library community hovering between its tradition as a craft and its future as a professional or academic discipline. Our knowledge of library activities is mostly the craft-person`s intimate knowledge of her craft. And the greater value of the badger report was that it exemplified another type of library knowledge: systematic, analytical, and probing.
In the crafts, knowledge is practical and often tacit. It develops by personal experience at work. It cumulates by story-telling. You learn from your elders and you learn by doing. Like other specialized crafts, librarianship has a tendency to become self-sufficient and self-censoring – a vocation with a single authoritative voice. During my years as a teacher of library subjects at Oslo College, a recurrent demand – from the more independent students – has been: Take less for granted. Ask more questions.
In his scathing – and very funny – attack on the structural and cultural inhibitors of disciplinary development in North America, Blaise Cronin says that a “discipline” that trades in feelings rather than ideas, and defines its core as a special kind of service relationship rather than a body of abstract knowledge, is not a discipline: it is, in correctly speaking, a vocation, defined largely in terms of skills and competencies (techne), and as such has no place in the heart of the academy (p.52).
In the academic professions, knowledge is explicit, codified and open to challenge. Science institutionalizes doubt. Knowledge cumulates by continuous testing. Truth is always on trial. The normal response to challenge – for groups as well as individuals – is denial. Doubt is uncomfortable. It takes a disciplined mind and a dedicated community to accept the never-ending scrutiny that lies at the heart of the empirical sciences – in their natural, social and cultural flavors.
In the scientific sense, we know very little about the content of reference work in public libraries. Quality studies have concentrated on ready reference, which is the most easily measured component. But a study of general reference work at two Swedish public libraries in 1995 provides some interesting findings. One of the libraries was a county library system, with one central library and eight local branches, and a total staff of forty (calculated as full-time equivalents). The other was a branch library in Gothenburg (Widebäck, 1996).
The occupational profile that appeared was that of a general purpose librarian-on-duty rather than that of an information retrieval specialist. Practical and logistical tasks, like providing books from the closed stacks – in the central library – and ordering books from other libraries, constituted major components of the work. About half the reference questions were simple questions of orientation within the library - Where do I find books about Y? where do I find the specific book X? The other half consisted mainly of simple factual questions that could be answered by looking at one or two sources – and a smaller group that required more extended searches.
The documented picture of actual reference work deviates strongly from the picture presented and promoted in official documents and debate (p. 17). In the Swedish study, less than ten percent of the tasks called for true professional skills. The Director of Public Libraries may in fact be right: difficult questions that demand professional training may be so infrequent that the skills themselves grow rusty. Scattered evidence seems to indicate that this pattern is typical of small and medium-sized public libraries. The central public libraries in the larger cities do, however, support more professionalized search services. From an economic point of view there seems to be a mismatch between supply and demand. Our reference librarians are either underutilized or overeducated. And we could, in principle, envisage three ways of rectifying the situation:
The coming of the WebBut all questions of reference must now be reevaluated. In a networked digital environment the old relationship between professional description and craft based reference can not be sustained. This does not mean that document desription is on the wane. The explosive growth of net-based publishing is creating a new demand for resource mapping, evaluation and description. For all their value, automatic retrieval systems do not discriminate enough. Spiders, web-crawlers and other creatures of the night can not fully replace the professional judgment of the subject specialist. The systems lack – at least for the present – intellectual scalability. So digital descriptions – in all their metadata glory – are in.
But does not the web signal a new era for reference work as well? A golden era for public libraries? Information at the touch of a button? The problem is simple: access to information is increasing thousand-fold – and so is competition.
Internet is already a substantial provider of information in many areas: ready reference, current events, higher education, professional events and organizations, media, museums and exhibitions, travel, government information (local, national, EU), general business information (usually of a positive and uplifting nature), and – not least – special interest groups in any thinkable domain. Most of this information is recent, but there is also a growing body of classical texts and other “copyright-expired” materials available.
The rate of growth is remarkable. It is both quantitative – adding more resources to the areas mentioned, and qualitative – adding new types, kinds and modes of information. We can already envisage a not so distant future when “everything” will be printed on digital paper – unless there is a particular reason for not doing so. Net access will be the normal situation.
Add professional resource description and powerful search engines, and the efficiency of reference work will multiply. But the question now becomes: who will provide the services? Can public libraries – even if free – compete with the new commercial information providers that are entering the reference field?
Competitors
One well-known Web entrepreneur, Bill Gross, is currently exploring the market potential for a commercial, Web-based reference service. His company describes itself as follows:
answers.com is a unique information service that delivers responsive, direct answers to questions regarding personal interest, work, or formal study. When your time is too valuable for unfocused search results, use answers.com to find that specific answer to your question. In most cases, our Answers Advisor will be able to provide a citation from a text reference or from an Internet cite. … answer.com`s modest fee structure, with up charges for faster than 24 hour service, is designed to free you from time-consuming searching, information overload, and dealing with problematic reference sources. You select the degree of difficulty and the time frame for the delivery of the answer. … Custom research projects will be undertaken on a quotation basis.
In contrast to commercial information brokers, which serve the business market, answers.com is clearly aimed at the general public. Its modest fee structure looks as follows:
The service is very focused on the customer`s interest in rapid, responsive and direct answers – when your time is too valuable. The professional staff are named Answer Advisors rather than librarians, documentalists or information specialists. Two company slogans sum up the attitude. Customers are told: Great questions … Thoughtful answers. Employees are encouraged to Work fast but reason well.
The logic of networked resources
Public libraries have traditionally served the public at large, primarily in their roles as private individuals or as members of the local community. Increasingly, public libraries are also being asked to support educational activities and programs. Cooperation with primary and secondary schools is growing – though schools also have their own libraries. But the major change in demand is coming from the many thousand students who now pursue further education at home, without physically moving to their teaching institution.
Educational reform
This, however, is only a beginning. The new Norwegian prime minister, Mr. Torbjørn Jagland, has made life-long education one of the central policies of the Labour government. The central organization of Norwegian employers fully agree. Continuous upgrading of skills and knowledge is seen as the key to individual and collective success. A newspaper article from the main Labour newspaper, Arbeiderbladet (January 30, 1997) illustrates his thinking:
Visiting the part-time students Gry Lisbeth Bjørnerud and Wiggo Slåttsveen at their home in Lillehammer, prime minister Torbjørn Jagland was able to test – in advance – the reform he is working on. As full-time employees with 3 children, Gry Lisbeth Bjørnerud and Wiggo Slåttsveen have no chance to follow regular classes.
- We felt the need to upgrade, and this form of education makes it possible, Slåttsveen says. Through video, data, distance education and a few group gatherings both parents have completed their one-year study of pedagogics, and are ready for their exams in a fortnight.
- We must invest in distance education to satisfy the needs of firms and individuals, (Jagland said). That way many more can participate in the adult education reform. In cooperation with libraries, many more will be able to access knowledge directly from the Web, independent of time and geography. Linking colleges and libraries opens unimaginable possibilities.
Plans are underway to allow all employees to use one tenth of their total working life for further education. This means, roughly, to double the current capacity of Norwegian higher education. Public libraries could play a central role in this reform – if they are able to redirect their energies towards systematic educational support. This would also vitalize reference work, by forcing libraries to cope with a steady stream of mature and focused adults – who would not take 55% for an answer. In Norway, I see this as the main hope for reference services and reference staff in public libraries.
Commercial services
Public libraries also have a possible third sphere of action. Librarians have the basic skills, and libraries have many of the information resources and networks, that are needed to support local business. Some Danish libraries, including the central public library in Copenhagen, do this on a small scale. Fees are subsidized and modest.
A few public libraries in Norway have also experimented with market-oriented reference services. But Norwegian law on public libraries, which states that services shall be free of charge to the end user, as well as a strong resolution from the Norwegian Library Association last year (1996), has effectively stopped libraries from engaging in such activities. They could, of course, provide such services free of charge, but that would be hard to justify, given the needs of other customers.
It may, however, be possible to organize non-profit foundations associated with public libraries – and use them as buffers between the non-fee resources and the paying customers. Hope springs eternal. But academic and special libraries are not bound by the non-fee principle. Information access is becoming more and more crucial to local firms. In the future we may therefore see regional college libraries offering market- and technology-oriented reference services – in the documentalist tradition – to local business. Since regional colleges and public libraries also must cooperate much more closely than before, we may see some interesting turns and paso dobles – between local firms, local college libraries, local public libraries and their associated non-profit foundations.
General reference
Till now, public libraries have taken pride in their ability – in principle – to answer any meaningful question presented at the reference desk. The sober reality of reference work – its fragmented, diffuse and undeveloped nature – did not modify the ideal. In a post-modernist world librarians continue to dream of universal systems: universal availability of publications (UAP), universal bibliographic control (UBC), and – we could add – universal access to information (UAI).
The coming of the web means that ordinary individuals will have rapid access to a greater range of reference resources than any librarian could dream of a decade ago. In the age of print, retrieval and reference tools developed gradually, as a slow response to the increasing output of published texts. In the digital age, new forms and institutions supporting retrieval and reference – search engines, quality controllers, subject organizers, FAQs, digital encyclopedias, personalized newspapers, agents and knowbots – are growing as fast as the Web itself. The disorder of the Web is already a myth – the digital continent is being surveyed and organized before your eyes.
If we look ten years ahead, it is hard to envisage general reference work, for the average curious adult, as an important professional task. In a complex, global, multicultural environment, people will have many questions (Childers, 1994). And there will be numerous institutions and organizations, commercial and non-commercial, in every subject domain, to provide guidance, answers and problem-solving. We can assume that nearly all of them will be on the Web – so individuals will be able to access them from their terminal at work or – in many cases – at home. The Web itself is already packed with a legion of intensely competitive information providers – and what they offer is, precisely, what we used to call reference service.
Many librarians argue that people without PCs at home should be able to access the Web through public libraries – and I agree. They also argue that people will need navigation help on the digital Pacific – and I agree. But libraries that move in this direction – which I heartily support – should be aware that the Web is a much more dynamic environment than the world of print. The Web functions globally. If there is a demand for information, it can aggregate thousand scattered customers into one interesting market. Reference librarians do possess skills that are extremely valuable in the Web environment. But the period of local monopoly is passing. As the Web matures, all the various functions of today`s public library will be probed and questioned. The market for free information of mediocre quality will not totally disappear, but it will become profoundly uninteresting.
In the educational reference market we have a chance, since this is a government priority and will be supported by substantial funding – if libraries manage to deliver consistent professional services. In the quality market of general reference we can only compete by imitating our new competitors – and asking the government to pay the bill. I can only say: good luck to those who try.
Librarians dreamt the impossible dream – Universal Access to Information. It is being fulfilled. But should we laugh or cry?
Bibliography
