Editorial: Retail Reference
Are we downgrading reference just as questions get harder?
Francine Fialkoff, Editor-in-Chief -- Library Journal, 3/15/2006
Debate rages across libraries about whether we're dumbing down reference, delivering what several librarians have referred to as a retail store model: not just quick in, quick out, which is fine, but service delivered by the retail store equivalent of clueless clerks.
In one Midwestern city library, the director is ready to hand over front-line reference to clerical workers for a couple of bucks more than minimum wage. The director doesn't have an MLS, but she is literate and well educated. She has never worked a public library desk, nor does she really understand databases. Yet, she's been heard to say that Google Scholar is all that library patrons need for reference.
Before you try to figure out who that “factional” director is (she's a composite), read “Tacoma Moves Reference to Main”. Tacoma PL director Susan Odencrantz explains why the system is transferring reference service (and people) to the main library. Not only will Tacoma better serve the branches with telephone, videoconference, and computer reference, says Odencrantz, but it will be able to train and use better the paraprofessionals who now deliver reference in the branches. The impetus for change is low funding and personnel shortages, but the reality, says Odencrantz, is that “the nature of reference questions is changing, and the numbers are down. What we are ending up with is harder questions.”
The phenomenon of harder questions crosses public, academic, and special library borders. Simultaneously, librarians battle with the perception that you can find everything with Google. Corporate librarians have countered that by delivering competitive intelligence, better research tools, and training to company staff. (That hasn't necessarily saved the corporate library/ian from being made redundant.) Academic reference has been retooled, too, adding one-on-one, in-person instruction and online tutorials for students to the repertoire and setting up base in academic departments.
Public libraries are testing myriad combinations of centralized/decentralized reference and on-site/remote delivery even in systems that haven't experienced a downturn in reference queries. “We're actively in a mode of looking at how we do reference,” says Terry Maguire, of the County of Los Angeles Public Library (CoLAPL). “What are people looking for? What are the new consumer electronics [that might be the next delivery mechanisms]?”
Right now, CoLAPL has two-tiered reference. Front-line librarians answer frequently asked questions about how to navigate the Internet and get answers for patrons who have been searching themselves for 45 minutes but “can't nail the answer down,” says Maguire. Tier two librarians take email and 24/7 queries as well as the tough questions, the time-consuming and off-the-wall inquiries that need more sophisticated databases. As one librarian puts it, “We're the reference librarians for reference librarians.”
Reexamining reference service is smart. Downgrading it isn't. Valeria Fike, just named LJ Paraprofessional of the Year, who supervises reference support staff at the College of DuPage Library, says, “I do reference work, but I have my 'dotted line' boundary.... I tell my staff there is a certain level where you turn it over and refer it.... That is an awareness that each of us has had to develop.” Fike, who has a master's in theology and a library technical assistant certificate from DuPage, is often the end of the line for reference help, whether for students working on assignments or researchers with questions on the Bible.
“Shouldn't you expect some level of academic sophistication at the reference desk?” asks one friend who works in a public library. “You have to be prepared to answer real reference questions.” That's what Fike and others do, whether librarian or paraprofessional. They deliver real reference, not some retail version.
