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Holt's PerspectivesDecember 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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