The Future of Reference Services Papers
Technology, Cluelessness, Anthropology, and the Memex:
The Future of Academic Reference Service
James Rettig
Prefatory note: Although I imagine there are parallels or analogies between developments in reference service in academic and public libraries, my experience with public library reference service has been confined to the user role. Therefore I will confine my speculations about the future of reference service to the academic environment and leave it to others more experienced and knowledgeable to judge their applicability in public libraries.
Does reference service have a future? Of course it does and its future is one with the future of the academic library and the future of each depends upon the success of the other. The academic community has a voracious appetite for information. Information in the aggregate is inherently confusing because it does not organize itself for ease of use. So, no matter how well Yahoo,1 Ask Jeeves,2 Google,3 or any other service organizes one subset of information available to that community, the community will continue to need libraries and reference service to make the universe of information relevant. We currently do and will continue to do this by selecting, organizing, providing access, and interpreting relevant information. Reference librarians will have a role in all of these fundamental functions. Mission and purpose will abide; methods and modes will morph.
To sustain reference service's relevance to our academic communities, we need to account for potent external forces and environmental conditions that affect the assumptions and expectations of those communities' members. To begin with the obvious and the ubiquitous, consider information technology.
Information Technology
Electronic information technology, like clay tablets or papyrus or vellum or paper or microfilm, is a medium and a tool that enables the organization and dissemination of information. Unlike these static media, however, today's and tomorrow's information technologies allow for something approaching simultaneity in the interconnected processes of obtaining access, selecting, and organizing information. Librarians engage in these processes, but not in the same order as our users. We also engage in the process of interpreting information, something that no information technology demands of users and one that they can, if they wish (or don't know better), ignore.
Technology is simply a tool. It is a conduit for the delivery of information from provider to users. Although the physics, engineering, and programming that lie beneath the surface of information technologies and systems grows ever more complex and sophisticated, information technology tools grow more manageable and malleable for those who know little about the subsurface schemes that enable that malleability. Librarians have a role, as Cheryl LaGuardia has powerfully argued, in influencing the design and functionality of information systems. "Reference librarians," she says, "are the natural designers of the new tools for information organization, access, retrieval, and distribution: these are the functions we do best."4 We need to build on our successes and strengthen our role in this arena. Signs of success to date include developments such as SerialSSolutions,5 LSSI's electronic reference software,6 and Endeavor's ENCompass7-that is, more software designed to meet our needs through the synergistic partnership of technology experts and librarians creating tools for librarians and library users. As we have done with OPAC Web interfaces, we will identify tools and adapt them to our needs, taking the lead rather then being led by technologies that don't serve those needs.
Place
Throughout its 126-year history since Samuel Green proclaimed that "A librarian should be as unwilling to allow an inquirer to leave the library with his question unanswered as a shop-keeper is to have a customer go out of his store without making a purchase,"8 reference service has been strongly associated with specific place. Our vocabulary-reference desk, reference room-has long reflected and reinforced this. Telephone reference (and e-mail reference) has allowed users to reach into that place. This association with place, of course, derives from the strong role over those same years of the library as place. Inherent in both this practice and the design of our facilities has been the belief that they serve who sit and wait. National trends showing a decline in the number of reference questions asked in academic libraries imply that reference librarians sit longer but serve less at their reference desks.9 The argument that reference librarians spend more time with each patron who asks a question in order to help the patron with database selection and with navigating multiple database interfaces has validity, but for how much longer? How much longer should we accept that as status quo?
The trend towards interactive online reference, a tiny trickle today, will become a torrent tomorrow. Its tributaries will be many-our students and faculty will seek assistance from campus offices, residence halls, computer labs, homes, campuses half way around the globe where they are in residence, benches beneath shade trees on our own campus, and even from within the library building itself, perhaps from within sight of a reference librarian.
They aren't coming to us; we need to go out to them. In recent years reference librarians have done roving of reference rooms, glancing at the contents of computer screens and offering users assistance when it seems appropriate. We also need to rove electronically. This means that our information systems need features that monitor user behavior and, when they detect anomalies in use, alert a librarian who can then offer assistance online. Surely this can be done in such a way that user privacy and identity can be protected. Already we see the response mechanisms evolving in interactive systems that allow librarian and user to view the same Web page on their respective screens.
A decade ago I posited a Sixth Law, an extension of S.R. Ranganathan's Five Laws of Library Science.10 At the time I conceived that Sixth Law--"Every reader his freedom"11--as applicable only to the type of service (i.e., instruction or provision of information). Today it also applies to the mode of delivery-in-person, telephone, online-and tomorrow to holographic interactions and 3-D virtual reality.
Reference will remain place-based, but will no longer be place-bound. The place at which it is based won't be a reference desk staffed by a reference librarian. Instead it will be an information consultation room in which a librarian can work face-to-face with a user or from which a librarian can work screen-to-screen with a remote user. The place will also be a library's Web site, a "place" that transcends a building's fixity. It will grow organically to save the time of the researcher and to assure that every bit of information has its user and every user finds his/her needed information. The model, even if not the demographics, for our user populations of the future, including on residential campuses, is the University of Phoenix. The model for our delivery of services is probably the Jones e-global library®.12
Our Users' Values
We have been serving the "Net Generation."13 The students who entered college as 18-year-olds in 1993 were entering Kindergarten when the Nintendo craze swept the nation. They could barely remember a time that they did not interact with and control images on a screen. Every year since then our entering students have brought with them greater comfort with technology as well as greater confidence, justified or not, in their ability to use it well. We are now serving the IM (i.e., instant messaging) generation. Some of them add SmarterChild to their AOL IM buddies list; they ask it questions, receive guidance to relevant Web sites, and play interactive games of Hangman with SmarterChild.14 Their familiarity with information technology has spawned values we dare not ignore. Those values are immediacy, interactivity, personalization, and mobility.
- Immediacy means that our students expect to be able to receive service anytime of day or night, any and every day of the week. They expect that service to respond to them as quickly as their logged-on IM buddies respond even though, as we know, an online reference transaction, including of course the reference interview, is inherently more complex than exchanges consisting largely of sup, LOL, ROFL, gtg and other cryptic compactions of spoken language.15
- Interactivity means that they expect follow-up responses after the initial response to be equally swift. Fortunately IM offers the "brb" and "bbl" conventions to suspend conversation briefly without compromising the value of interactivity.16
- Personalization means that they expect to receive information packaged just for them. The My Yahoo, My AOL, etc., both manifest and fuel this expectation. Some My Library and some university-wide portals are responses to this, but lack the panache to be enticing to the IM generation.
- Mobility is a value that will increase. In addition, of course, to their being free (at least until recently), part of the popularity of Hotmail and Yahoo Mail has been their accessibility from any Internet-connected computer anywhere, anytime. As ubiquitous wireless computing becomes as commonplace as wireless telephony, the mobility value will gain importance.
These values implicitly undermine good reference service which, even when delivered in a short time, is far more deliberative than one-line volleys of contraction-packed instant messages. Our audience is clueless about just how complex the process is, how complex the universe of information available to them is, and how important a critical approach to information is. Nevertheless, we must recognize that the slogan of the Kash 'n Karry grocery chain, "Fresh, Fast, & Friendly," sums up key expectations students have of any service.
Making the Most of their Cluelessness
Great trust accompanies this cluelessness about information's complexity. Our current and emerging student users tend to accept what the screen displays. We know, through application of our values, that their trust is sometimes misplaced. We value factual information that is accurate; we value the credibility and usefulness of information in other media (e.g., printed reference books); we value equity of access to information; and we value personal(ized) service to individuals. Our students' values and ours intersect at personalization.
Students are naive or clueless about the complexity of information even as they trust information they retrieve or that is pushed to them in ways consonant with their values of immediacy and interactivity. This cluelessness and trust can be a potent combination, one that can lead them to trust information that lacks accuracy or credibility. Nevertheless, many students recognize quality information when they see it; they just don't know how to search for and retrieve it. All of this can work to our advantage, and theirs.
Anthropology and Access Engineering
Just as we are experts in information storage, access, retrieval, and systems, we need to become expert anthropologists of our user communities. Through study we need to learn their information handling habits-their knowledge of the information universe, their understanding or misunderstanding of its inner workings, their appreciation or ignorance of the implications of those inner workings for their academic work. By knowing their values, assumptions, and knowledge of information issues, we can develop resources that respond to those values, assumptions, and knowledge but that do not affirm their assumptions whole. This is the role that Jerry Campbell envisioned a decade ago when he called for the transformation of reference librarians into "access engineers."17 It is a task we undertook with vigor when we began creating reference Web pages, a task we continue to refine. We now have the tools (or at least the early, rudimentary tools suitable for access engineering) and are developing sufficient knowledge of our users to fulfill the dual role of anthropologist and access engineer. We can see some effective manifestations of this in projects such as the University of Nebraska at Omaha's Research Wizard.18 With this tool, developed in-house, UNO librarians quickly and easily produce resource guides tailored to a topic some of their users are interested in or tailored, in collaboration with a faculty member, to the needs of students in a specific course.
Other tools will assist anthropologist-reference librarians in creating resources that capitalize on users' values of immediacy and interactivity as well as on their ability to recognize quality information when they see it. Among these tools are enhancements to today's integrated library systems that allow simultaneous searching of multiple databases. We can use these to guide students not just to information available online, but also to our catalogs and the relevant resources in our collections in other formats. Think of this as "stealth information fluency." It neither precludes nor obviates the need for our intensive information fluency efforts such as collaboration with faculty, online tutorials, classroom instruction, etc. These will remain an important part of reference librarians' work. However, effective self-serve database selection tools available 24/7 will support those more direct instructional and information fluency strategies.
If we can simplify database selection for our students through our Web sites and those sites' wayfinding features, the students will use the same databases we would recommend to them in face-to-face reference encounters. This points to the biggest challenge we face.
Personalizing Mass Market Products
Even though every bit of it is in some way or other unique, the most valuable academic information is packaged and distributed through mass market channels-commercial databases, journals, books, etc. Our users, however, even when enrolled in the same course, present individual needs that do not match the ways information is packaged. Each user wants and deserves a personalized guide to relevant information resources, one that can respond appropriately to changing needs as the user's knowledge increases and as individual focus shifts from one topic to another. Since 1945 we have had a vision for a machine to provide this sort of service; that vision is embodied in Vannevar Bush's memex machine.19 Bush envisioned the memex as "A device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility."20 Our vision has also, of course, been embodied in the traditional reference desk service. The reference desk, however, is no longer a viable vehicle for service delivery. Even at its best, the reference desk served the few rather than the many.
Our challenge, then, is to move beyond tools such as UNO's Research Wizard to tools more like the memex. As Campbell has said, "We must become much more adept at transferring information upon demand from its source directly to the user."21 It will take all of our expertise as anthropologists-reference librarians and access engineers to create these tools. The solution to the challenge of providing highly personalized information service will unquestionably be delivered through technology; but it will be developed through a great deal of interaction with our users, interaction necessary to understand the infinite variety of their needs and to solicit and incorporate their feedback throughout the iterative process of creating the memex.
Above all, reference service must remain user-centered; high-tech and high touch are equally important. If it does not remain user-centered, it will become at best superfluous and at worst fossilized, an artifact not for anthropologists but for future information paleontologists to study. Surely we have the imagination, knowledge, and commitment to guarantee a vibrant future for reference service in academic communities. We have and we understand the right ideas; indeed, most of the articles cited in this paper are a decade or more old. Through entrepreneurship and experimentation we need to refine them through practice and thereby bring reference service's future into being.
Notes
- See http://www.yahoo.com/. [ return to text ]
- See http://www.askjeeves.com/. [ return to text ]
- See http://www.google.com/. [ return to text ]
- Cheryl LaGuardia, "Desk Set Revisited: Reference Librarians, Reality, & Research Systems' Design," Journal of Academic Librarianship 21 (January 1995): 9. [ return to text ]
- See http://www.serialssolutions.com/Home.asp. [ return to text ]
- See http://www.virtualreference.net/virtual/. [ return to text ]
- See http://encompass.endinfosys.com/. [ return to text ]
- Samuel S. Green, "Personal Relations between Librarians and Readers," American Library Journal 1 (1876): 79. [ return to text ]
- For example, data collected by the Association of Research Libraries (http://www.arl.org/stats/arlstat/) shows that its member libraries recorded 595,185 reference queries in 2000; 902,804 in 1999; 900,363 in 1998; 980,009 in 1997; and 961,812 in 1996. [ return to text ]
- S. R. Ranganathan, The Five Laws of Library Science (Madras, The Madras Library Association, 1931). [ return to text ]
- James Rettig, "Self-Determining Information Seekers," RQ 32 (Winter 1992): 158-63. [ return to text ]
- See http://www.egloballibrary.com/. [ return to text ]
- Dan Tapscott, Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998). Tapscott says "The term Net Generation refers to the generation of children who, in 1999, will be between the ages of two and twenty-two, not just those who are active on the Internet." (p. 3). [ return to text ]
- SmarterChild is based on BuddyScript(tm) SDK (Software Development Kit) from Active Buddy(r). See http://www.activebuddy.com/products/buddyscript.shtml. [ return to text ]
- "sup"-What's up? "LOL"-Laughing out loud. "ROFL"-Rolling on the floor laughing out loud. "gtg"-Gotta go. [ return to text ]
- "brb"-Be right back. "bbl"-Be back later. [ return to text ]
- Jerry D. Campbell, "Shaking the Conceptual Foundations of Reference: A Perspective," Reference Services Review 20 (Winter 1992): 29-35. [ return to text ]
- See http://revelation.unomaha.edu/research/wizard/, http://apocalypse.unomaha.edu/cil/index.htm, and http://apocalypse.unomaha.edu/cil/cil3/siframes.html. [ return to text ]
- Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think," Atlantic Monthly 176 (July 1945): 101-8. [ return to text ]
- Bush, 106-7. [ return to text ]
- Campbell, 33. [ return to text ]
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