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.