Organizing Reference

Reference is not something which can be contained within a building … and never was. Reference librarians have, or should have, a well-worn Rolodex (or data file) of contacts – people and institutions – that can get the answers that people want.

This is still true today despite the ubiquity of web pages. When you are confronting a tough problem or a confused person you need the name of someone who can interpret the need.

Unfortunately, reference as “practiced by professionals” still relies upon the individual sitting at a reference desk and his or her ability to scrounge up an answer. The Rolodex may be there, of course, but we need more.

We need a Rolodex (a Memex?) of specialized reference librarians.

Doing this is not easy for a number of cultural reasons and those organizations which could most easily create such a thing (such as library systems) are generally too stressed by financial issues to consider doing it.

But it can be done. The tech to create the reference categories is easy enough.

Which, I suppose, means that I’d best try to do it where I am and see if the notion can spread.

By the way, I also write a weekly newspaper column that has to have a higher priority than this blog. I may, from time-to-time, merely point to it in lieu of writing here.

Here’s my latest in our local version of the TribLocal: http://www.triblocal.com/Lake_Villa/List_View/view.html?type=stories&action=detail&sub_id=170691

I'll Bet You Five Bucks

Long ago, when I was actually working at a reference desk, I was accustomed to getting telephone calls to settle bar bets. Mind you, this was long before the World Wide Web came full blown in mind of Tim Berners Lee. Getting answers to the simplest questions wasn’t all that easy … and you wanted to get the answer from a neutral party.

The thing was, one of that library’s employees had a daughter who was a bartender. And since bartenders talk to other bartenders there was a pretty fair number of Chicago area bars that had the library’s telephone number.

We didn’t care. I’m guessing that the director was secretly pleased to be able to add the statistics into what would otherwise have been a pretty miserable count.

Those of us who worked reference there did learn a few useful lessons … the biggest one simply being that almost every one of these questions was one we could answer in a very few moments from the “ready reference” material we kept behind the desk (plus a few sports records books).

This is to say, most people never did want answers to complicated questions. They just wanted answers to simple things and didn’t know how to find them.

The Internet has done the reference profession a service by taking simple questions out of the library … but it does hurt the stats.

Getting a Clue

The novelist William Gibson noted during a 1999 NPR interview: “As I've said many times, the future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed.”

It’s a bit of a problem for those of us providing reference services. To generalize (and I do know of exceptions) those who are in their 70s might as well be on a different planet from those in their 20s. Also, those who live in areas without high-speed Internet access are not experiencing the same world as those who have it.

Whether or not our brave new world is “good” is another matter. Ease in asking a question is not the same thing as knowing what to look for or of knowing how to ask a question … one of the downsides of Google is that few people in their teens and early twenties know how to do a Boolean search, carefully adding or subtracting terms, in order to find gems in the mud.

There’s a sense – perhaps a primitive sense of magic – that the computer “just knows” the answer. That’s certainly the view I get from studies showing that students will seldom look below the first page of search results when doing research.

That actually makes a certain sense. If you don’t “have a clue” as to what comprises a good answer, any answer will do.

The answer to this, of course, is “Get a clue.”

That’s not easy. And that’s one great hope for reference services … as long as our reference department staff members are properly clued and dedicated to staying that way.

Working with Humans

I’ve a brother-in-law who’s a minister. In fact, he’s a Baptist minister. His calling has two definite sides to it.

On the one hand, he’s a “preacher” and has the traditional responsibility of writing and presenting his Sunday sermon. On the other, he’s a “pastor” and charged with tending for the spiritual welfare of his congregation … which, as a practical matter, can be just about anything.

There’s not much training for that in seminaries. There’s a hope that with the right attitude and life experiences as person can find a balance between the two great demands that make up a minister’s calling.

Reference librarians are put in a similar place. On the one hand, there’s the “book learning” needed to understand a question and find an answer. On the other, there’s the learning you need to have in order to understand the person who comes to you with a question … and that’s often a very elusive thing.

Anyway, my brother-in-law chose to read the “classic” novels in order to get more experience with the human condition than he had obtained while growing up on an Iowa farm. This included Dickens, Austen, Dostoevsky, and the like.

I’ve long thought that he made a very good choice and that it’s one that many reference librarians could follow.

Even those of us who were English majors.

Amateur Reference

A book published a couple years ago … that’s 14+ years in “Internet time” … has some bearing on the problems of reference. The title is: The Cult of the Amateur: How blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today's user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values, by Andrew Keen.

Given that you’re reading this on a blog you’d correctly realize that I might have an issue with the premise.

That said, both the current reality (easy Internet searches) and a bit o’ the history that created modern American culture impact reference services. It’s the history that makes the overblown title a bit annoying. Here are five very old issues that make “amateurs taking on more than they should” as American as the proverbial apple pie:

1) Protestant religion
2) The Frontier
3) America’s size
4) Democracy
5) Materialism

The combination of “Protestantism” and “literacy” created an environment favorable to do-it-yourself theology … in large part because it is easy enough to pick out parts of the Bible that fit one’s pre-existing notions.

The Frontier, of course, created a need for self-reliance and a do-it-yourself mentality. The mountain men couldn’t drive to the nearest Wal-Mart when they ran out of beaver traps.

America’s size meant that large percentages of our rural populations were always a long way from any larger town, a half-day’s buckboard ride (and a half-day for the return trip). Self-sufficiency and “amateur” are frequently two sides of the same coin.

Democracy meant – and still means – “do-it-yourself” in the political and judicial spheres. Expertise may, now, mean some minimal educational requirement. Voting (and running for office!) however have few, if any, minimal requirements except being a registered voter.

Materialism has meant getting more. And more. Unless you’ve the money to hire someone else to repair (or completely lack in skills) you’re compelled to do many things yourself … in some areas, that’s a sign of general capability. (I’ll be taping and mudding drywall myself over this next weekend since I’ve a son in college.)

Now, having listed above, is it any wonder that people will avoid going to a reference librarian when a (to them) viable option exists? Hardly. And that’s why libraries have to work very hard to establish that their reference librarians offer something which the do-it-yourselfer lacks.

That’s not always easy.

On Knowledge Management

One of the “new professions” is that of the knowledge manager … a person who is charged with leveraging the “intellectual assets” of a company. It is very akin to what corporate librarians have done since the beginning of the 20th century (and, in my view, why the Special Library Association was formed outside the American Library Association umbrella).

It is more active than librarianship (as generally practiced) inasmuch as the KM practitioner focuses on charting, assessing, cataloging, and publicizing *internal assets* while the librarian focuses on *external assets* … but they are also natural partners since external assets become internal assets once the information is valued and becomes part of an employee’s knowledge. That also works in reverse since internal assets are extremely useful to know about when one is doing a library search.

That said, corporate librarianship … if you’ve a reference background and inclination … has always been about “getting answers.” How was never very important when your immediate need was to establish the value of your services.

(That lesson was drummed into me by a pair of marketing guys. As the saying goes, you can get the answer to a question cheaply, quickly, or accurately – pick two. The library serves to optimize the process. KM brings in a new set of resources.).

That said, KM is not reference librarianship. It creates structures, builds databases, and recognizes relationships … but it doesn’t necessarily do the nitty-gritty work of discovery needed to make good use out of what it creates. Corporate types unfortunately tend to assume that employees will use KM created tools.

Which they will just about as often as they use library resources.

Beyond Reference

I'm about to go on a bit o' vacation, but wanted to first leave the questions:

Why are "reference services" restricted to libraries? Or are they?

Reference Reading

Some years ago, at another public library, I needed to hire a new reference librarian. This of course meant interviewing a number of people, some of whom were bad, some of whom were good, and some of whom were, ah, odd.

One of the last stood out.

One of my “standard” reference interview questions was simply to ask what the interviewee had been reading lately, the idea being to gage how closely the person was following the news and (broadly) developments in various fields. This person revealed that her reading consisted solely of light novels. She didn’t read the newspapers or the weekly news magazines, much less anything more specialized.

She had gone through all the work of getting her masters degree because “she wanted to work in libraries because she liked to read books.” That’s as close to her direct words as I can remember today, perhaps 15 years later.

Well, that’s nice. Unfortunately, those of us who work in public libraries seldom get to read books while we’re actually working. Sorry. We’re doing other things. Needless to say, she didn’t get the job.

I’m a member of a long-established online community and one of the members started a conversation on “what people read online every day.” That led me to thinking … What do reference librarians read today? Or, perhaps, in this day of common high-speed access, What do they view or listen to as well?

I’m thinking it’s not so much the print magazines and newspapers anymore. That’s true for me as well. I’ll read the online versions of a couple local newspapers, plus parts of national newspapers, and I’ve got a range of online sites that I read almost every day (including a few blogs).

That’s considerable reading … but there’s a very large downside to it all. It’s entirely self-selected. I may be fairly well-informed in a few narrow areas but, at the same time, I’m abysmally ignorant of events in other areas.

That’s a problem for everyone, but especially for reference librarians.

One thing we librarian types should do is create a daily blog (and weekly newsletter) on “Important Events” in various fields. There would be no large articles, just brief descriptions and links to the appropriate urls.

Non librarians might be interested and subscribe but reference librarians have a real need for this sort of thing.

Perhaps someone will enlighten me if there currently is such a thing. If not, and I’m still grousing about this seven years from now, it may become a retirement project.

Basic Reference Education … part two

When I was fairly young, professionally speaking, I ran the corporate/research library for Masonite Corporation. This was, then, a Fortune 500 company and was a big name in the forest products business.

(The company’s been bought a couple times since then and filed for bankruptcy, but you can still see its logo on a few products.)

This was among my happiest experiences as a librarian inasmuch as I was working for people who appreciated my services … but not enough to avoid being laid off along with 1/3 of the R&D staff in early 1982. Masonite is where I was first exposed to online database searching, at 300 baud. It is where I wrote a database thesaurus. It was also where I became familiar with non-Library of Congress Subject Headings.

You see, when you’re running a specialized library the LC headings are insufficient. Your users need more detail, especially when they are on the “cutting edge” and are actually inventing the terminology as they go along.

This was, sort-of, what we’d call “tagging” today. I was doing some of this as well since I had been given the responsibility of re-reading and indexing all of the research reports going back to the late 1920s. Some items just didn’t fit the terminology in general use in the early 80s.

I relied upon two sources to help my “humanities trained” mind wrestle with what chemists and wood technologists were reporting. These were subject thesauri from The Institute of Paper Chemistry and from the Forest Products Research Society.

I mention this because it is important for beginning reference librarians to understand that there are subject headings beyond what LC can provide. It is important in a time when users are able to put their own tags in the library catalog. It is critical when reference staff need to tag the online resources they use … especially as “the semantic web” seems to have flat-lined from a predictable lack of interest.

I suggest that one thing reference librarians going for a master’s degree might do is create a thesaurus for some smallish field-of-knowledge. Perhaps covering a small town’s history or a hobby. Those going for a doctorate might do so for something larger, such as a state’s history or an academic discipline.

I also suggest that one focus for the “reference profession” is the maintenance (and curation) of such thesauri at some public web-accessible place for their use by people wanting to tag the documents and sites they think need tagging. This way, such tagging might be usable for more than just a decade or so (if that!) … and feedback would help the profession keep tabs on the ever growing, evolving, use of language.

Basic Reference Education

Reference work can be done whether or not there’s a library at hand … the Internet has made this entirely too evident to those who wonder what it is, exactly, that reference librarians do.

In my view, reference needs to be done at two levels. The first is “basic” and requires an expanded sense of cultural literacy. The second is “advanced” and calls for a subject specialist (or at least someone who has a recognized expertise in some area, perhaps due to some personal interest).

An expanded cultural literacy, in our age, is not an easy thing to acquire. Those who have a college degree in English Literature, for instance, need to understand the basic issues of science and technology. Those who have degrees in the hard sciences need art, literature, and the “soft sciences” such as sociology. Reference librarians need to bridge the “Two Cultures.”

It’s a matter of filling the holes in one’s basic education. There are a lot of “basic texts” that could be used for this purpose, with many of them now finding their way to the Internet.

A “master’s level” in basic reference can be created by 1) defining and providing what needs to be taught – and to whom – and by 2) providing education/training in the use of various search tools. Some, now a relative few, would be traditional print sources (especially if the student in interested in working at the university level) but most would involve the use of electronic tools including search engines, open and subscription databases, etc.

One might note that this requires a cross-disciplinary master’s – something of an anathema in academia – and the very thing that Dewey could not get Columbia to allow in his first attempt at providing graduate-level training for librarians.

Though, of course, he was concerned with cataloging.

On Anonymity

If you visit the reference desk at the Lake Villa District Library, where I’m often unreasonably proud to be the director, you’ll find a plastic stand that holds the business cards for twelve of the staff members, including me.

A few are for department heads who might be out of the building, but most of them are for reference department members, both librarians and paraprofessionals. They have our staff members’ full names.

This isn’t a very common practice in public libraries. In many cases, if you see business cards at all they will only have first names on them.

The reason is fear. Fear of the occasional unbalanced person who uses the library and who might want to contact a staff member outside the library … if only he/she had a name to look up in the phone book.

There is indeed something to this. I’ve worked in an urban library. I know that the mental hospitals were emptied decades ago and that people who should be under some type of continuing care are walking the streets and into public libraries where odd behavior is generally tolerated.

But the desire to avoid confrontation has a solution, the police, and – from the point of view of library management – creates a great problem.

It de-professionalizes reference services.

Would you let “Doctor Jim” do your annual physical? Would “Attorney Jane” handle your will?

No. We do not want these people to be anonymous. We want to know who they are so they can be accountable for the work they do or the advice they give.

Professionals cannot be anonymous.

The Reference Dance

A busy reference desk presents a problem … how do you allocate resources, people, when the laws of chaos state that business will come and go, peaking at unexpected intervals?

From the management side of things you do the best you can. From the reference librarian’s point of view you learn how to dance.

Dancing here doesn’t mean the solo display of technical brilliance a la Baryshnikov. It’s a dance with partners, more of a slow pavane, occasionally something much faster, even sometimes approaching a square dance.

It’s about attention, giving it and receiving it, with the reference librarian moving from partner to partner as the situation – and complexity of the question – warrants. Direct eye contact, a warm smile and an “I’ll be right with you” should be enough to let the next person in line know that he or she will not be forgotten.

A good reference librarian not only dances, but involves library patrons in the dance. This is often necessary when confronting a difficult question at a busy desk, especially while the telephone is ringing and e-mail is arriving. The patron who knows that he or she has your attention will generally not begrudge having to share it, as long as they’re sure to be included in the dance.

500 Librarians

Librarianship has revolved around the necessity of cataloging ever since Dewey founded the profession’s first graduate school. “Library economy” a la Dewey meant cataloging and the ancillary skills needed to create and maintain a library.

This was essential in an age where every library was a kingdom of its own and every library needed to do “original cataloging” of everything it added to its collection.

Things changed. Libraries were able to purchase pre-printed catalog cards from the Library of Congress after the turn of the century (and from H. W. Wilson beginning in the 1930s). This meant that not every library needed to catalog its own material … or at least not all of it.

This took away the “grunt work” part of most cataloging and replaced it with the “professional part”: assigning call numbers and subject headings. The grunt work that remained consisted of typing subject headings and such on a pre-printed card.

(Lord knows I did enough of this at my home town library before I received my MLS degree, little appreciating that in the one-person libraries I worked at soon after getting the degree I’d be doing the same thing.)

Of course, things changed again. Libraries are now able to obtain their bibliographic records from “bibliographic utilities” such as OCLC – basically a “shared cataloging” function involving thousands of contributing, and sharing, libraries.

I once did a back-of-the-envelope calculation of how many catalogers were needed in American libraries (with the largish assumption that such were competent and the work would not have to be reviewed – and often redone – at every library).

There were 172,000 titles published in the U.S. as of 2005 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_per_year). Assuming that a good cataloger could do one an hour (I know, a ridiculously low number when so many are fiction, but I allow that some non-fiction titles represent real problems), that’s eight per day and 384 per year (giving a four week vacation).

Do the math, and that amounts to 448 professional librarians being sufficient to catalog and classify every book published in the United States.

So … why should cataloging remain the most important focus of professional library education?

Why “Quid est veritas”?

When Pontius Pilate reportedly uttered “Quid est veritas?” (“What is truth?” in John 18:38) he was responding to Jesus’ claim that He came into this world to bear witness to the truth.

A modern American might have replied, “Hey, what do I know?” to the same effect – that “truth” is hard to pin down, especially what might well be only a subjective truth. Pilate’s problem was that what he saw as a subjective, perhaps even petty, issue was a very serious and objective one to those he governed.

A reference librarian, of course, might have asked Jesus if He had a citation for that.

Reference librarians are, sometimes, on the safe path of looking for what appears to be an objective truth. “How tall is Mt. Everest?” “How can I write to my senator?” What’s the atomic weight of Uranium?”

Other times, the “objective truth” comes on shifting sands. “How tall is Mt. Everest (using the latest measuring methods)?” “How can I write to my senator (so I can be most sure that he/she will read my letter)?” “What’s the atomic weight of Uranium (used in atom bombs)?”

Sometimes, they’re in a trackless desert where it’s hard to nail down, to objectify (as it were), the question in an answerable form. “What drugs interact with my medications?” (Let’s hope the person asking knows what they are!) “Who discovered the DNA helix?” (Watson and Crick probably don’t deserve all the credit for a team effort.) “My father might have been exposed to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War … what should I do about his symptoms?” (Finding out what the “might” means is best done through a referral … he might actually have spent the entire war in Philadelphia.)

At other times, they’re in quicksand.

“What version of the Bible shows that black people are supposed to be slaves?” (That was a real question at a real reference desk.) What was the cause of the War Between the States? (That’s a bit of a poser because that’s not how the American Civil War is generally regarded from the POV of the victors.) Who won the Korean War? (Nobody won, actually, since there’s never been a peace treaty … but the South Koreans seem to be doing pretty well lately.) “How big is the Loch Ness monster?” (Good luck with this one!)

There’s no “one right answer” for these questions.

The “nature of truth” is, in no small part, the world of the reference librarian.

The Library Professions

It’s my view that the word “librarian” is almost meaningless. The broad popular view … which includes anyone sitting behind the circulation desk … is uncomfortably close to the mark. A “librarian” is, entirely too logically, someone who works in a library.

A “professional librarian” should be someone who is specially trained in that work. Back in the day, before Dewey, there were only two or three closely related library professions: the collection developer, the archivist, and the cataloger. They worked to create and maintain the library. They were frequently the same person, often a retired scholar. Perhaps, indeed, a Casanova.

Whether or not anyone else was welcome to use the library was another issue entirely, but as these librarians were generally scholars there was a commonality of interest between the “library creators” and the (most academic) “library users.” Others weren’t as welcome.

I own a copy of an Emerson essay (I think the title is “On Books”) where he suggests that the panjandrums who ran the Harvard library might hire a few librarians to work with the students and acquaint them with its content.

Dewey’s library school concentrated on just one species of librarian: the cataloger. The reason was that this technical craft was in extremely high demand during what might be called the “first information explosion.” This was the mid-19th century nexus of 1) universal literacy, 2) high speed printing, and 3) the burgeoning discoveries of science and exploration. The librarians of the time could not keep up with the flow of new titles. The “professional cataloger” was the result … but, unfortunately, the training that led to cataloging largely became the training that led to all of the other library professions.

These professions – reference, youth services, reader’s services, audiovisual, and (now) electronic media – were stunted as a result. Each of these should have its own master’s level degree and, indeed, its own doctorates. Those of you reading here can no doubt think of others.

(If people can get a doctorate in film studies – and they can – then a doctorate in any of the above is surely possible.)

Imagine, if you will, what today’s librarianship would be like if database management had developed as a “library profession” rather than as a “computer sciences” profession.

I doubt that any of the graduate schools would have closed.

Maintaining Expertise

We had a half-day “in service” last Friday … time, among many other things, for my annual “state of the library speech.”

We’re doing well, in major part (on the resources side of things) because ours is a public library district. We’re not dependent on the largess of a cash-strapped municipality.

Looking forward, though, things aren’t nearly as clear.

For one thing, the fate of the printed books is very much undetermined. I tend to think that libraries may actually thrive, though that makes the rather large assumption that the library community – through the use of its own professional discussion boards – will review and evaluate the books and such that will no longer be found with main-stream publishers.

(That’s an effect of both technology and of the continued reliance, by main stream publishing, on blockbusters to create revenue.)

I’m not so optimistic of video/movie collections in an era where downloading a film for home use is likely to cost less than a short drive to the public library.

That said, I think people will continue to come to their public libraries in order to talk to knowledgeable people.

On the “reference side” of things, this means people who know what is going on in the world and in their community. This also means that the people who work at the reference desk should be reading at least one weekly news magazine, plus at least one daily paper and whatever local papers are available … and doing this at work if the time can be spared (and it should be).

Some years ago, I was working at a public library when a patron from a neighboring library walked in, asking us who his local state representative was. He had asked at his own library and was given an answer that he did not think was right.

Which was true. The person he had been told was his representative was serving time for misusing campaign funds.

It had been in all of the papers.

The 55% Rule

Some years ago … I think in the mid-80s … the Maryland State Library sponsored an unobtrusive evaluation of reference services within that state. Teams of students approached the reference staffs at various public libraries with a number of selected questions.

Only 55% were answered correctly. That’s a bit more than one out of two.

The response in the library press was to suggest that reference staff members always follow up with the question, “Does this answer your question?” I think that’s pretty reasonable in nearly all cases, excepting of course that one must realize that the questioner, often enough, has no idea whether or not the answer provided is actually correct.

If he/she knew they most likely wouldn’t have needed to ask the question.

One might also think that, gee, some questions can be pretty difficult. 55% might not be all that bad.

However, if you read the original paper’s “test design” you find that all of the questions were what are called “ready reference” questions, ones that could have been answered from the short list of books almost every reference desk has close to hand. These are such things as encyclopedias, almanacs, thesauri, dictionaries, etc.

In other words, there was no research to do … just decoding the questions and reaching for the proper books. In my view, 95-plus% should have been answered correctly.

The answers were there. It was the reference staffs that were wanting.

Reaching Outside the Library

The fact that reference is a function performed in a single library does not mean that it is of the library … anymore than, say, the scholarship and research devoted to a critically acclaimed history book researched on three continents. The reference librarian also needs to go where the information is.

Due to the problems of real-time access to information, this was indeed at one time (usually) the library, though those of us who’ve worked in research or corporate libraries also know how to work a phone if necessary. Those of us who cared about quality reference services in public libraries also knew how to use a phone and generally had a torn and tattered Rolodex as well.

This all changed with the advent of online information. First came the “for a fee” databases such as those provided by Lockheed’s DIALOG system in the 70s and 80s. Next (of course) came the Internet.

If the reference librarian can be said to have a “home” today, it’s the Internet. We use books, we use subscription databases, we use telephones … but when it comes to having an idea as to what is happening in the great wide world there is nothing that can compare to the breadth and power of the Internet.

Books give us depth; the Internet gives us breadth.

Cultural Literacy

Some years ago, E. D. Hirsh burst onto the popular scene with his book Cultural Literacy (http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Literacy-Every-American-Needs/dp/0394758439/ref=sr_1_1/176-3464292-8649704?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265833270&sr=1-1) His point was that there were things which every American should know.

I’m not sure I’d agree with all of his choices, but inasmuch as I agree with the vast majority of them I consider myself to be more or less in agreement.

Anyway, I entered into a brief correspondence and explained the role of the reference librarian as a facilitator for those who don’t know what they are looking for … and he agreed that reference librarians working in public libraries should have an expanded range of “cultural literacy.”

How to get it, though, is something of a problem. The existing MLIS programs are, in my view, quite useless and the few “Masters in General Studies” programs out there do not seem to meet any particular need (except maybe revenue for the universities offering them).

We need a new degree.

Inputs and Outputs

If you ever have a chance to review the catalog for a library graduate school, you’ll notice that there are lots of courses devoted to the “inputs” needed to create a library (assembling and providing self-serve access to knowledges) but blessed little on the “outputs” that the library is supposed to provide.

The assumption is that people come for books, media, and databases. I’ve always found this odd and disquieting. It is true in some areas such as fiction guidance, but not true for most people most of the time.

Consider reference services. The dilemma is contained in its very name. The original idea is that people would come to the library and that librarians would “refer” them to the correct material that would answer their needs. I rather imagine that the first reference librarians discovered within the first ten minutes that people wanted to obtain knowledge ASAP (and in simple words) rather than read a text which they might not have the educational background to understand.

Hence reference service evolved into providing answers … but our library schools did not evolve into providing the types of broad education (in a wide array of knowledges) needed for the reference librarian to understand the texts (and questions!) themselves.

This is, I think, understandable from the POV that early reference librarians most likely *did* understand most of the reference questions they encountered. The “information world” was vastly smaller then.

And yet …

Long before Dewey opened the first graduate school for librarians there was a call for advanced library education in what was called “encyclopedia.” This made perfectly good sense in an age where each library cataloged its own material since each person involved with cataloging had to have at least some basic understanding of the text in front of him (and they were mostly “him” rather than “her” prior to the development of the Dewey Decimal System).

Somewhat ironically, Dewey himself tried to establish a multidisciplinary graduate degree prior to his successful establishment of the “technical” graduate degree, the Master’s in Library Science). Columbia would have none of it, in large part (I suspect) because of lack of cooperation between the established schools (turf issues). The technical degree was possible, I think, because the latter 19^th century was an era where graduate degrees in technical areas were proliferating … that’s why so many US universities have the word “Technology” in their names.

The Social Aspect of Knowledges

The first edition of The Social Life of Information, by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, was published 10 years ago. It somehow seems less … and I do wonder what influence it has had outside that seemingly small circle of people employed in “knowledge management.”

Here’s a bit about the book: http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~duguid/SLOFI/

Brown and Duguid discovered – or re-discovered – that while “knowledge” is something an individual possesses, “information” itself is largely social. That’s to say that it is generally something which is derived through the combination of various experiences as described through shared language.

I wrote “re-discovered” because the idea of “information” (a subset, as it were, of “knowledges”) being social is an old one. There is also an important library/librarian connection: the development of the concept of “Social Epistemology” by Jesse Shera:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Shera

Of course, when we talk about “Web 2.0” or “Web 3.0” we’re availing ourselves of the social aspects of information … that’s what tagging is all about. That, in my view, has both advantages and disadvantages.

The great advantage is that ideas, events, etc., can be described in the contemporary terms that individuals actually use. The great disadvantage is the likelihood that these will change over time.

Consider: I was the corporate/research librarian for Masonite Corporation in the early 1980s. One of my tasks was the re-indexing of all the old research reports. These went back to the 1920s.

By the time the late 50s came along the company (by far the largest in that particular branch of wood processing) was beginning to experiment with what it came to call “low density hardboard.” This was the “index term” used within the company. Much later, a new index term was being used … by younger researchers unfamiliar with the previous work. The new term (one you may recognize since it’s now a generic product name) was “medium density fiberboard.”

The previous work was ignored because no one knew to look for it. And this was within the largest company that specialized in manipulating wood fiber. The “corporate memory” had failed and millions of dollars were wasted recreating previous work.

Knowledge and Knowledges

One of the issues to be faced when discussing the “reference librarian” as a profession lies in defining “knowledge.” It’s become an exceedingly slippery word.

From Dictionary.com:

1. acquaintance with facts, truths, or principles, as from study or investigation; general erudition: knowledge of many things.
2. familiarity or conversance, as with a particular subject or branch of learning: A knowledge of accounting was necessary for the job.
3. acquaintance or familiarity gained by sight, experience, or report: a knowledge of human nature.
4. the fact or state of knowing; the perception of fact or truth; clear and certain mental apprehension.
5. awareness, as of a fact or circumstance: He had knowledge of her good fortune.
6. something that is or may be known; information: He sought knowledge of her activities.
7. the body of truths or facts accumulated in the course of time.
8. the sum of what is known: Knowledge of the true situation is limited.
9. Archaic. sexual intercourse. Compare carnal knowledge.

I think we can ignore the last.

Interestingly, when you look for “knowledges” you find no definition … though this was once a word (I picked it up from Francis Bacon) that seems to have gone out of common use in the early 19th century … leastways as far as I could determine. It’s related to #6 above. It’s the things one can know in the various “fields of knowledge” that comprise our world. The content of what we broadly label “biology,” “politics,” “religion,” etc. are the knowledges that appertain to each.

In another way of looking at it, “knowledges” are what are “knowable.” And the latter (and here I’m following the lead of various “knowledge managers”) is a reflection of an internal state. Books, etc., do not contain knowledge.

People, however, do and it can be argued that some automata might.

Why A Blog?

That’s easy enough. From King Henry V: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; or close the wall up with our English dead.”

Those of you who have access to Library Literature and Information Science can easily find what I wrote from the mid 80s to the mid 90s. Aside from an RQ article on building a local business directory database, the items are on “library theory” rather than “library practice.”

No one seemed to care about “theory” … not even enough to take issue with what I had to say. That wasn’t entirely a surprise. The “overly practical” nature of library literature has been an issue for many years. I can vouch for the past 40 years and I know that the library educator Louis Shores had bemoaned the 40 before that. There was a kerfuffle over this just a few days ago on the PubLib list, or so I interpreted it, with one writer bemoaning a perceived lack of depth and others defending it.

Anyway, I abandoned the library literature when I found the web, starting my first (highly practical) “Library of Tomorrow” discussion on ElectricMinds in 1996. I wanted to talk to knowledgeable library users rather than to librarians or administrators, working from the supposition that users and the technologies they choose to use would be pushing the public library agenda more than anything else.

I learned much more than I taught. I’ve learned from web theorists, social theorists, technologists, knowledge management gurus, and many, many more.

I’ve also learned much that dovetails into and refines my earlier theoretical concerns. 15 and more years have passed. It is time to write again.

Crystalizing a Point of View

Long ago, before I went to library school and immediately after I'd graduated from college, I worked for a year in my hometown public library in order to determine whether or not I wanted to make a career of it. I'm no longer sure of my job title then ... it was something like "senior clerk" ... and the year proved invaluable inasmuch as I learned the "backroom routines" of the day.

Typing hundreds of catalog cards pretty much convinced me that I wanted to work in reference. That was, however, off limits since I didn't have a masters degree (yet). But I watched and occasionally learned.

One of our reference librarians was a very nice Chinese lady whose grasp of English was adequate but whose American cultural experience was limited. A patron came to the reference desk and asked if she could help him with his carburetor problem.

That was something outside her experience. She repeated the word, slowly, a couple of times and asked him what this was ... and eventually learned that it had something to do with his truck. The patron in turn learned that she hadn't a clue about what he was looking for and made the (rather natural) assumption that he wasn't going to get much help from his library. He left before she could explain that the library owned many things about trucks (which was as far as she could go since she had no idea what a carburetor was).

Meantime, the mere clerk (me) was frustrated because he couldn't really speak out. I knew what a carburetor was. Heck, growing up blue-collar and male meant knowing quite a bit about carburetors. I also knew where the various repair manuals were.

The lesson I learned was that it was at least as important to understand the question as it was to have access to the books.

The Reference Conundrum

Those of us who are ... or have been ... reference librarians usually understand that there can be an enormous gap between a question and its answer. The naive question may require a sophisticated answer. A sophisticated question may, perhaps, be answered in a dozen ways ... with each of them "right"from a chosen perspective.

The latter is a rather general problem in economics, history, or politics.

The purpose of this blog is to explore the issue of "reference." It is not about books and databases, but rather about the knowledges (note the "s") needed to use them.