Internet Librarian
 By Joseph Janes
American Libraries Columnist
Associate dean, Information School, University of Washington, Seattle
intlib@ischool.washington.edu
May 2007
Exciting Wallpaper
The challenge of staying current yet keeping what works
I don’t know about you all, but I get a lot of e-mail. A lot. Really. Much of it can be immediately deleted; some warrants at least a cursory answer; a few require serious time and focus and thoughtful reply; even fewer are fun and make me smile; and a chosen select group get just, well, ignored and sit in my inbox taunting me. I always think of that as digital plaque or waxy buildup; maybe I need e-mail floss.
In any case, a lively discussion on DIG_REF, the discussion group about all things digital reference, relieved the tedium somewhat. People were debating the relative merits of commercial digital-reference software and off-the-shelf instant messaging tools.
Being an inveterate IMer myself, I have always thought that IM goodies (AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, Trillian, and so on) are a simple, lightweight, good-to-go solution. They’re already widely dispersed in many of our user populations, familiar and comfortable for clients, easy to learn for librarians, without unnecessary feature clutter, and achieve the vast majority of our objectives for quick communication. (For the record, I’ve always thought co-browsing was clumsy and unnecessary—copying and pasting URLs in an IM window works just fine for me.)
So that was fun, as well as being notable as one of the few really intriguing conversations I can remember on DIG_REF over the last several months. It’s been a great list for many years, but of late the topics have been pretty pedestrian.
Topics timeless or tired?
This put me in mind of a session I went to at ALA’s Midwinter Meeting in Seattle, a roundtable discussion on digital reference with some old friends and new faces. Lots of topics got thrown around: difficulties with using licensed electronic resources, especially in consortial services; assessment and peer review; training and quality control; marketing and communication, technical and software issues; staffing levels and patterns; problem or crank calls; and so on.
All important, all valuable, all to the good—although I couldn’t help thinking that those themes could just as easily be the list of topics covered in a discussion three years ago or more.
Does this mean that digital reference has run out of steam, that those heady days of excitement are over? Hardly. But neither does it mean that there’s nothing left to be done, and these are just production systems facing the typical day-to-day maintenance and management needs.
“Digital” reference (but really, we all know that it’s all “reference,” right?) needs to continue to grow and develop. It also needs to continue to perform; the techniques and tools of reference work using digital tools have become firmly ingrained in the practice of reference in general, and services can’t solely be lurching from fad to fad. By the same token, they can’t abandon innovation either.
The same is true for any other aspect of librarianship in the 21st century. As the information environment continues to evolve, we respond, our practice continually unfolding and innovating while keeping the doors open, cherishing and honoring what has been—without getting stuck where we are.
No easy task. There are serious pressures in both directions: an obvious imperative to stay current and try new things without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Exciting wallpaper, surprising furniture; services that are there and work, yet also change and grow.
The (digital) reference folks I’ve been privileged to know and work with are a community of passionate, exciting, excited people, exploring old territory with new eyes and ideas—territory I am very much looking forward to rejoining more fully when my administrative duties end this fall . . . but that’s another story.
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