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Holt's
Perspectives
Glen
Holt may have retired from active
duty running the St. Louis Public Library, but he continues to be a
leading thinker and commentator on today’s library
world. The LLN Commons
is very pleased to
be able to pass his perspectives on to our readers in a weekly column
to be authored by Glen. We hope you will not only find his
viewpoints of interest, but that you will feel free to contribute your
thoughts on the topics he
raises.
December 8, 2005: LIBRARY
REFERENCE AND AUTOMOBILES
Evolving cooperation is
a continuing theme in library
development.
A researcher needs an article that her hometown Library A
doesn’t have. She calls her friendly local
librarian who calls a friend of hers in nearby Library B.
That person drops off the article to her friend in Library A, who calls
the customer who drives to the library to get the source. The
researcher uses the time to get what is needed, is grateful for the
personalized help but cares little where the article copy comes
from.
A researcher wants to read a chapter in a book that pops up during an
at-home Internet search where it is suggested he check OCLC WorldCat to
find out which nearby libraries hold it. WorldCat shows the
book is available in Library C in another state. The
researcher requests the book from his local branch Library D which
orders the volume on interlibrary loan from Library C. The
researcher pays a small fee for the ILL, gets what he wants, is
grateful to his library for making the inexpensive ILL possible but
cares little where it comes from.
A researcher recognizes that his hometown institution, library E, does
not have the magazine and newspaper databases she needs, but Library
F’s website, a thousand miles away, shows that it subscribes
to all the databases she needs. She purchases a library
membership from library F. Going around hometown library E,
the researcher gets what is needed for the price of an annual
membership fee, is grateful to Library F for having purchased the
rights to the databases she needs, and cares little where it comes from.
A researcher has a question on the climatology of arid
regions. She walks from her St. Louis city residence to her
neighborhood branch Library G, where her favorite staff member
“calls the main library” which has both reference
librarians and reference collections. The person handling the
reference desk at the main library says, “That’s a
question we can’t answer quickly or well. However,
let’s check our Reference Help Listings.”
Both staff pull up the list and find that Library H at a university
research center in the Sonoran desert of Arizona has an arid regions
bibliographer. The branch quickly calls the bibliographer who
talks directly with the researcher. The bibliographer says,
“That is a hard question; it will take me a few minutes to
answer it. Where can I e-mail you the information?”
The researcher returns home, fixes lunch and in the early afternoon her
answer comes in an e-mail attachment. The researcher gets
what is needed, is grateful for the personalized help from her favorite
librarian but cares little where it comes from. Next time she
needs expert information on desert climate, she will call the Arizona
bibliographer directly – even if it means paying a fee -
because that will be convenient and save time.
I write these examples to suggest that either formally or informally
the multi-dimensional reference world of the future already is open
before us. That new world, based on fast, real-time
communication, is one in which place and institutional boundaries are
falling. The newest piece of the question-answering picture
are inter-institutional reference collaborations, where an expert in
one institution in one place answers a question for a researcher in
another time zone in another place, using either voice or electronic
communication.
Just around the corner is another change; that is, when database
vendors – in both the for-profit and non-profit sector, offer
the help of expert reference staff with the databases they vend to
libraries. Those subject reference experts may be in
libraries but may be independent contractors as well. For
those who think it can’t happen, I point out that the persons
who annotate articles for National Institutes of Health are contractors
working from their own homes or offices, with quality control handled
by a few professional librarians at NIH. Or look at the
different roles that different librarians in many different places have
played in the continuing development of EBSCO’s
NoveList.
As knowledge becomes more and more specialized and electronic
communication cheaper and easier, the pattern of library reference will
become more formally collaborative. The main resistance now
to the next stage of reference collaboration is
institutional: Many libraries have not quite figured out that
reference expertise is one of the easiest things to share across place
and institutional boundaries. And, as they continue to
maintain that resistance, the rest of the reference world will continue
to develop new forms.
As the last of the buggy makers and the buggy-whip makers discovered,
resistance, rather than adaptation to change results in being run over
by a motorized personalized vehicle that users recognized as
faster and more convenient than what they offer. Let us try
to make sure that library reference does not suffer the same fate as
ubiquitous Internet technology casts it spell ever further over the
library workplace.
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