Assistant Professor, Information School, University of Washington.
intlib@ischool.washington.edu
Column for August 2006
OK, I’m going to brag. Not about myself, but about Lorri Mon, a recent graduate from our doctoral program who is the University of Washington’s gift to the LIS research and teaching community as she takes up a faculty position this fall at Florida State. (You’re welcome.)
Her dissertation examined an interesting and important question: how the users of digital reference services perceive those services. She interviewed a number of users of e-mail and chat-based services, working through the transcripts of their sessions and asking for their perceptions and opinions throughout.
The results of Mon’s research are myriad, fascinating, and more than occasionally sobering. For example, users “preferred quick, complete, nonredundant answers that fully resolved their problems, with a focus on saving time throughout the process.”
Although it’s impossible to reasonably summarize her findings here, I’ll highlight one result that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise: In general, users were more satisfied and had more positive reactions to their experiences when names were involved—when librarians used their own names and referred to users by name. This increased their sense of social presence in the interaction, which they valued a great deal.
Earlier this year, I had my reference students use a number of information services, face-to-face as well as digitally mediated, synchronous and asynchronous. They also answered users’ questions through the e-mail–based Internet Public Library reference service. Among the thoughtful and provocative commentary I received for both assignments was a palpable sense of disconnection—the feeling that, valuable as these services can be, it’s not hard to come away missing the personal connection that people so often want.
Therein lies the rub. Are there any other professions where it’s hard to know the name of the person you’re working with? Would you trust or even use an accountant, attorney, doctor, or designer you didn’t know by name? Yet libraries routinely fail to use staffers’ names when conducting transactions, including digital-only ones—or worse, they actually prohibit the use of names. I understand and respect security and privacy concerns; but would a first name endanger anyone?
The calculus about digital services of all kinds hovers around access. Be it online catalogs, digital reference, licensed databases, or you-name-it, once something becomes available via networks, its availability to the clientele immediately soars.
In many cases, though, one feels that something is missing, lost in translation. Online catalogs don’t have the tactile nature and marginalia of their cardboard elder cousins; online databases lose the sense of ownership and permanence of a print serial subscription.
Technology needn’t necessarily diminish the human presence. Surely, there are ways that we could use it to increase personal contact with our communities. Witness the library staff trading cards from Carleton College. More of the same are available on Flickr (search for “librarian cards”).
I learned of those cards in Jenny Levine’s blog (another potentially connecting technology). Mirabile dictu, I’m amazed and thrilled that Jenny’s been hired to work for—gasp—ALA, as an internet development specialist and strategy guide. In part, her job description reads: “The overall responsibility is to provide vision and leadership regarding emerging technologies, development of services, and their integration into the ALA environment.” Cross your fingers.
Jenny represents a breed of librarians who look at Flickr and blogs and podcasts and wikis and see not only ways to automate what has been, but entirely new ways of doing things as well as entirely new things.
People who entered the profession some time ago started out thinking about using technology to connect to something—databases, catalogs, resources—and such early experience often lingers. The new kids, however, often began using computer tools to connect to each other. That will undoubtedly color and broaden their vision, and they will think of things differently than we of previous generations.
Of course, we oldsters, who are generally the ones running things, know that personal connections are important. Yet we’re perhaps unable to envision how that might fit in an increasingly digitally mediated world. Maybe we should just get out of their way and let them do their thing . . . but that’s another story.