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There are many indications that reference service is in trouble: for example, as Internet use in a community goes up, a growing number of libraries are noticing a decline in circulation and use of its reference service; many library administrators believe the hype that search engines are a handy substitute for librarians; and reference librarians are finding it a daunting task to keep abreast of the new resources that appear daily on the Internet. These signposts are early warnings that unless reference librarians reorganise their work to be available to the remote user, not only will they become extinct, but the wealth of print resources stored in libraries for use in libraries will go unused, thus threatening the very role of the library itself. Within this context, this paper provides a perspective on the information seeker in the digital environment as one whose need for personalised, human-delivered reference service is greater than ever; it suggests new organisational structures that put the reference librarian centre-stage, more visible than ever, more consulted than ever; and thus offers a way to revitalise the position of the library in its community.
I want to talk to you today about an endangered segment of our profession: reference librarians. Or rather, I should say an endangered part of what reference librarians do all day. Reference librarians serve many functions, and not all of them are in immediate trouble. We provide instruction, both one-on-one and in groups, with the aim of helping the client become a more independent user of information resources. We create Web pages of links to resources useful to our local clientele and FAQs to give static answers to other people’s questions we think will be asked by more people. These days we are meeting with clients by appointment, spending considerable time helping them work through a research problem. Those are not the parts of our work that need our immediate attention—though they are, I believe, potential candidates for the endangered list — but that’s farther into the future than I want to think about today. What I want to talk about now is the very special role that has defined us since the turn of the century when reference service was invented: assistance to information seekers at their point of need. That is what is in deep trouble.
And I want to be clear that I’m talking very narrowly about not the generic ‘information professional’ but the reference librarian educated in a library school to a set of values and standards about access to information by all members of a society and one who views the computer as just one more tool that will help bring clients in contact with the information that will solve their problem.
What is at stake here is not just reference librarians, but much more. I hope to convince you that we must become pivotally involved in providing point-of-need reference service to information seekers at the place where they are when they have a question. Certainly the business world recognises this need and is readying itself to provide library-type interactive remote reference service. In a recent article on the trend toward the replacement of human reference service by machines, Ron Heckart says, ‘Library-oriented developments in online interactive help have their parallel in the business world. Private industry is pouring millions of dollars into customer-support software research and development …’ The market for customer-interaction software ‘is estimated to reach $3 billion in annual revenues by the year 2000.’ I believe that if we do not pay attention to this part of our work, we will not only witness the disappearance of reference service by librarians, but also with our disappearance will be the creation of a vacuum that commercial interests such as Microsoft will fill, thereby ensuring the privatisation of library functions at the highest levels.
Let me begin by supporting my assertion that reference librarianship is in trouble. Then I will examine the question of whether our extinction is a good thing, one more step in the march of progress — that is, are we really no longer needed, or is it that we are needed and it’s something else that is causing our difficulties? And finally, I will point to ways to reverse the downward course so that we emerge more vital than ever. As much as possible I will report the observations of the thinkers and practitioners, including those I had the privilege of working with in Library of Congress programs throughout most of 1998, who cumulatively have led me to my conclusions.
Reference librarians who are not in denial know that doing business as usual isn’t working the way it used to. In an editorial entitled ‘Hard Choices’ in the journal Searcher, Barbara Quint says what most of you surely must be feeling:
[Librarians are not] dying over coping with the rise of the Internet and its Web and the decline of old-style online … however, it sure feels rough enough. Part of the problem lies in the feeling that we have begun to continuously lose ground to our clients. In the past, the pecking order seemed so stable and comforting … We, the information professionals, knew where everything was that could answer a question with any reliability, and, assuming we and they could afford access [to the online databases], the clients had to come to us to get it. We owned the online passwords. We owned the skills to access the arcane search languages. We even owned the libraries filled with books … Now every Tom, Dick, and Harry thinks they’re an online searcher — and they are! Our clients, customers, patrons, whatever, zoom around the Web thinking they can find whatever they need whenever questions occur to them. And the damndest thing is that sometimes — all right, lots of times — they’re right! Even worse, they sometimes find things that we don’t find, things that our print and traditional online resources never had in the first place. Then these nouveau riche, johnny-come-lately onliners end up talking to us like peers … Good lord! … As if this professional degradation were not enough, now the resources upon which we based our superiority start to crumble around us. Amazon.com seems to list almost as many books as the MARC records on our OPACs, and certainly with friendlier, more effective access routes. Scholarly Web sites and listservs circulate current research results years before print journals and often with a more open critical commentary through discussion threads, as opposed to the mysterious, silent, editor-only process of peer review. In an environment where institutions have begun downsizing, outsourcing, and eliminating traditional libraries, geniuses in charge of expensive, traditional, online search services have decided that the time has come to impose even more charges for the same service. Sometimes it feels like we’ve all just fallen overboard without any life preservers.
Quint points out that we brought this on ourselves. ‘In fact,’ she says,
some of it we worked our tails off to bring about. Remember all those long and lonesome years when no one knew what the term ‘online’ meant but us? Remember when we had to hustle search requests out of passing strangers? … Through those dark and deprived times … we kept telling everyone that online was the future, that someday everyone would believe in online the way we did, that online would one day answer all of the people’s questions all of the time. Well, we were right … The technophobia and technical illiteracy problem seems pretty much solved. Whoever hasn’t come online yet, soon will. Peer pressure alone should do the trick; if it doesn’t, modern mass advertising should. Who would want to admit ignorance of a process that advertisers seem to assume everyone with a wallet knows how to do?
While I have found no formal study that proves it, there can be no doubt that in communities where use of the Internet is on the rise, circulation statistics and reference statistics are declining. Journal articles and listserv threads report the decline simply as a statement of fact, sometimes without any sense of discomfort. I recently facilitated a meeting of staff from a library network of three well-wired public library systems that wanted help thinking through this very problem. They have a cooperative reference system in which their unanswered reference questions get bumped up from their branch to their own main library, and from main library to a reference center. Over the last few years their annual reports to the state library, which provides funding to them, have shown a steady decline in the number of reference questions they receive. It seems that the main libraries of the three systems are not forwarding so many questions to the reference center because with the Internet they can answer more on their own; and the branch libraries are not forwarding so many questions to their main library because they can answer more questions at the branch level; and the reference desks in the branches are getting fewer questions because … because why?
That’s a question we must answer. One reason must certainly be that their Internet-using clients are answering more questions on their own. And if that is indeed the reason and the only reason, then it is right that we should disappear. But is that the only reason, or is it even the reason at all? There’s a good chance, even when the reference desk is within eyesight, that for at least some people the reason they don’t ask is simply that to leave a workstation and go to the reference desk with a question risks losing their seat to someone waiting for it. Others might think that having to explain their problem by leaving their workstation and trying to repeat the symptoms on the librarian’s computer is too complicated, so they don’t ask.
These are all guesses. However, administrators and funders of libraries don’t guess. With no-one to contradict them, they believe the reason we’re getting fewer questions is that the search engines can now do the job — and better than we can. So, as they reorganise library work, reference gets downsized, downgraded, or eliminated. Anthropologist Bonnie Nardi explains that librarians are prime targets for elimination because our work is invisible — to our clients, to our administrators, even sometimes to ourselves. In her introduction to a recent issue of Computer Supported Cooperative Work devoted entirely to perspectives on this important concept of invisible work, Nardi says of librarians that no-one recognises that real work is being done or that it is of value, or they don’t understand the importance of what librarians do, and so administrators are willing to cut library funds. She says that the methodologies used in studies that purport to analyse and measure the work of intermediaries such as librarians do not uncover their non-repetitive, non-routine, conceptual work. You can imagine, for example, that if you measure your reference service simply by dividing your hourly wage by the number of questions you answer on average in an hour, that comes to an expense that keeps going up as the number of questions answered per hour goes down, till it reaches a point where it seems very expensive.
Bonnie Nardi is well qualified to give us a perspective on ourselves since she spent considerable time researching reference librarians. She was hired by Apple Computer to work on a project to develop intelligent software agents for the desktop. Using an anthropological approach, she asked, ‘How do intelligent human agents behave?’ This led her to the Apple Library to study reference librarians as an example of intelligent human agents. She was invited to share her findings at the Library of Congress Institute I organised last June. In her talk she gave examples of the work reference librarians do that is invisible. For instance, she was surprised to realise that clients often come to us not really knowing what they want, and that a large part of what we do is what she calls ‘information therapy’, helping them figure out what it is they really want to know. She regards this information therapy as an example of human intelligence, when applied to the search problem, that cannot be replaced by a computer but that doesn’t get included in the measurements of what we do.
Our response to a declining number of questions being asked at the desk has been to keep ourselves busy at other things that have the potential to grow. But before we ourselves assist in the demise of our information therapy service, we need to understand better why people are asking us fewer questions. And to reach an understanding of why people are asking us fewer questions, we need to understand the nature of the information seeker —why a person asks us a question at all.
Bonnie Nardi’s view that there’s always something we humans can do that the computer can’t is one way to explain why people ask questions. Based on that premise, she makes the case for maintaining a blend of software and human question-answering resources. But that premise is flawed. It is conceivable to me that there will be a time when computers indeed hold the answers to all our questions (just as it’s quite conceivable to me that there is intelligent life in other galaxies). I want to put before you a more compelling explanation of the information seeker, one that leads to a powerful argument for maintaining our point-of-need reference services. It is based on what we know about the nature of the information seeker: not only why they ask a question, but also how they formulate the question, and where they go to get their answers.
Brenda Dervin, inventor of the art of neutral questioning (an interviewing technique that helps the reference librarian efficiently understand the client’s question), says that there are some universal truths about information seekers:
So it follows that of any three people that ask you the same question, the answer that would satisfy each might be different, depending on the situation that gave rise to their question. Any reference librarian knows that the question the client asks is often not the real question they want answered. Before we can answer these three people’s question, we need to understand the situation that got each of them stuck and the use to which each would put the information we found for them. Seen in that light, then, the function of any service to information seekers — regardless of whether that service is in human form or otherwise—is not to answer questions, but to eliminate blockages by filling in gaps in information.
It’s safe to say, then, that everybody will be an information seeker — i.e. will be blocked — endlessly throughout their lives and will consult some thing or some person to become unblocked. Whether the information seeker is successful using a non-human resource to become unblocked depends on several factors, such as:
On the other hand, every non-human information system is organised in a way that optimises a desired level or type of retrieval, and questions must be asked of it according to some guidelines peculiar to that system. So the chances are slim that the information seeker will always choose the right resource and know its rules for querying it and retrieve relevant information.
We know a lot about information seekers by looking at the record of where they go to get their question answered. Research shows that when looking to fill the gap of missing information, people go first to their own home libraries, then they telephone a friend or colleague who is likely to know, and probably last, they go to the library. And once in the library, they may not ask their question of a reference librarian even if they cannot find the answer they’re looking for on their own because the reference desk is out of sight. In other words, people will go first to the most likely source that is convenient. Convenience is what governs the choice of where to go. As human animals, we are all happy to accept ‘good enough’ that’s handy over best, or even better, that we have to work to get to. As Nancy Van House puts it, ‘Convenience is paramount over quality.’
But you already know that. Since time immemorial, we have striven for the perfect information system, whatever money could buy or minds could imagine — and its main characteristic is always its convenience. Isaac Asimov’s Book of Facts tells about the Persian warrior, statesman, and scholar Abdul Kassem Ismael, who ‘in the 10th century had a library of 117,000 volumes. On his many travels as a warrior and statesman, he never parted with his beloved books. They were carried about by 400 camels trained to walk in alphabetical order. His camel driver librarians could put their hands instantly on any book their master asked for.’
Or consider L. Frank Baum’s information system created in his 1920 book, Glinda of Oz:
Dorothy … ran over to a big table on which was lying open Glinda’s Great Book of Records. This Book is one of the greatest treasures in Oz and the Sorceress prizes it more highly than any of her magical possessions … I do not suppose there is any magical thing in any fairyland to compare with the Record Book, on the pages of which are constantly being printed a record of every event that happens in any part of the world, at exactly the moment it happens. And the records are always truthful, although sometimes they do not give as many details as one could wish. But then … the records have to be brief or even Glinda’s Great Book would not hold them all …
Even in magicland they sacrifice quality for convenience.
In short, the information seeker will always get stuck at some time or other and will want immediate help that can best be given by a human intermediary who, in Brenda Dervin’s terms, will negotiate the large objective world of information to bring the information seeker in contact with the relevant subset that would fill the gap. The reference librarian fits perfectly the concept of the intermediary whose intervention makes the difference between the success and failure of their customers’ requests. And the reference librarian fits perfectly the information seeker’s ideal: getting advice from an expert—evaluated service, personalised service, and efficient service. The goal of the information seeker, after all, is not to get the information as an end in itself, but to get on with the larger task. Or, in Dervin’s context, information seekers want immediate service so as not to break the flow of the larger task’s progress.
In-library users who try in vain to find what they need on their own can come to the reference desk. But where does the remote user go, the distant student, the searcher from home or office? Well, they could wait and telephone or go to the library during regular business hours, but since that’s not convenient, you know they won’t. You can cajole and and insist that they contact you when they have a question, but given the way our service is currently structured, they simply won’t. To underscore this, I want to share with you the observation of Karin Smith, Information Services Librarian, Charles Sturt University. Karin was one of the staff of the pre-conference workshop we gave recently, ‘Developing Point-of-Need Reference Service to Remote Users’. As we were planning the workshop, Karen pointed out that in libraries most people don’t ask for help and when they do ask at the desk,
there are many interpersonal cues involved in extracting their request from them … I am sure more people ask for help because we catch their eye or simply offer assistance and it is an interpersonal interaction. The Internet doesn’t offer that interpersonal situation so people don’t get the cue to ask. In every residential class for distance education students I show them the library homepage and the databases, etc. and I always offer the freecall number so they can get help with structuring their searches or generally using the databases more effectively. They are always grateful for the offer but they never ring. I tell them that no-one ever rings to ask for this sort of help, even though it is offered, and they laugh and say they will, but they never do. Based on my observations of how ineffective internal students’ searches can be when they are left on their own, I have no reason to expect that external students are doing any better on their own.
Put Dervin, Nardi and Smith together and there can be no doubt that reference librarians are a necessity. And if you will accept the premise that an increasing percentage of our clientele is comprised of remote users, it also becomes clear what we have to do to reverse the downward trend. We have to become more convenient. You might look at it this way: rather than thinking of our users as remote, we should instead recognise that it is we who are remote from our users. We need to change how we do business in such a way as to get us back together.
Many libraries, of course, are doing just that by providing email reference service: their Web sites offer the searcher the opportunity to ask a question of a librarian via email. I haven’t heard reports of any of them being overwhelmed with requests for that service. Just the opposite. They report that the number of requests is quite low, low enough to enable them to provide service to clients beyond their jurisdiction. Rather than this constituting evidence that users don’t need us because they are finding what they need on their own, the reason for the low number of users might well be that too few people know about the service or perhaps turnaround is too slow. Remember, the client’s goal is not to get answers but to get on with their work. So only those who have the time or are willing to wait would use it.
We need to provide access to reference service in a way that is as obvious and as convenient to the remote user as is access to the information itself. Such a service needs to be built into the infrastructure of the Internet. Picture this: a searcher at a workstation somewhere in or out of the library is looking for information but isn’t finding it, or doesn’t know where to start, or is in some other way stuck. On the browser is a flashing link labelled ‘Click here to talk to a librarian.’ The searcher clicks and a screen entitled ‘National Reference Service’ gives you a description of the service and when it is appropriate to use it. When the user clicks on the ‘Continue’ button (or perhaps chooses ‘Yes, I want to talk to a librarian’ from among a menu of options), there appears a live person (via, say, CuSeeMe or Netmeeting interactive software) or a box in which text is rolling out (using MOO or Chat technology), that says ‘Hello, how can I help … ?’ The librarian checks not only digital resources but also library shelves — even the shelves of the questioner’s home library by searching its online catalogue of print resources. The librarian on call is anywhere in the world, working at the time assigned to her library each month by the International Reference Network, coordinated in each country by the national library. The Network consists of libraries throughout the world that take first-level questions and specialised libraries that take referrals from the first-level service. How does it get funded? The Network offers a menu of services — such as full reference service, after-my-library-hours service or limited in some other way — and libraries pay a subscription fee, that money to be used to defray costs for the on-call libraries.
This vision is just that: a vision. The technology is currently too awkward to make possible a fully functioning interactive remote service now. But it is only a matter of time before the technology will catch up with the need. Why? Because, as I said earlier, commercial interests understand that the need is there and that people will gladly pay for the service. Check out some of the existing businesses that today offer quick turnaround or immediate information services for a fee. I believe we must aggressively begin experimenting now with such projects so that we are there when the technology is. We don’t have to think in terms of a full-blown system. If we start small, creating local and regional pilot services, those would be the pieces that would build toward national systems and, eventually, international systems.
Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline, insists that any organisation that wishes to be around tomorrow must today be offering not what their customers are asking for but what they believe their customers would love to have but don’t know enough to ask for. He says that to do this, organisations must have ‘the ability to run experiments in the margin, to continually explore new … organizational opportunities that create potential new sources of growth.’
Of course there are other ways to provide in-your-face reference service. You can leave the library building altogether and work where your clientele is. Librarians who have moved their offices to be among their clientele claim that the ‘accidental information’ they pick up at the water fountain or coffee urn is not a library footnote or collegial gossip but rather casual information about what’s the latest their clients are reading or the hottest issues emerging in their clients’ work. Their view of their own work has changed from one in which their job is to translate the library to their clientele to one in which it’s their job to translate their clientele to the library. In this model, the librarian doesn’t wait to be asked a question; instead, having heard what her clients are working on, she supplies them with what she thinks they’d need; and she inaugurates new services back in the library that efficiently address the repetitive needs she’s dealing with on an ad hoc basis. The librarian becomes a partner in their work, and, most importantly, she is viewed by her clientele as a partner in their work. There is no better yardstick of the clients’ priorities than where they spend their money. It is common in the US for academic departments to give grants of money to the library for collections, and, of course, to its own teaching staff to support their research. As evidence of a change in their perception of the librarian’s job, the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Berkeley, recently awarded the position of Anthropology Librarian a generously endowed chair, in recognition of the current librarian’s indispensability to their research and teaching. The annual interest on the endowment is earmarked to cover the support she needs to keep up with change. She will use it to purchase state-of-the-art technology, travel to meetings, and enroll in workshops and classes.
If we do not begin now to demonstrate the need for reference librarians by providing service that recognises our clientele’s new ways of searching for information, there is more at stake than reference service by reference librarians. First, by our inaction, we will contribute to the decline in the use of the library’s paper materials. Online commercial information services draw entirely on electronic resources, and the organisation of their knowledge about these resources is in files of bookmarks, so their referrals consist of a bunch of URLs. The information seeker using one of these commercial services will never get the response, ‘The question you are asking is better handled by a wonderful reference book that is available in your library.’
Second, if point-of-need reference librarians disappear, who will serve those who can’t afford the commercial services? The reason libraries can serve the have-nots is that we serve the haves very well. Once we become a service to only the have-nots, we will lose the support we need to be any kind of an information service to anyone.
The third and perhaps the most powerful reason for us to take steps now is best expressed in the perspective that Bonnie Nardi presented at the the Library of Congress Institute. She likens us to biological life forms known as keystone species. Keystone species are members of the animal kingdom that help to protect its diversity. For example, ‘biologists tell us that on the inter-tidal rocks along the coast of Washington state, starfish are a keystone species. They prey on mussels, an extremely aggressive creature that would monopolize the rocks. The starfish keep the mussel population in check so there is room for barnacles and limpets and other kinds of marine organisms … I believe that in the information society librarians are a keystone species. And we want to keep librarians in our information systems to make sure that we clients have access to as great a diversity of resources as possible … It’s the mix of human and technical resources … That is really what we want to aim for.’
Nardi adds that it isn’t obvious which are the keystone species, in biology or in occupations. Certainly the invisibility of our work — the expertise, the values and the judgments that we bring to bear in a reference transaction — works against our being able to be identified as a pivotal link in the information chain. If librarians, as a keystone species, are allowed to become extinct, you would witness the decline in the diversity of information resources. The only resources that would be available to the information seeker would be those that are in electronic form. And, says Nardi, it could all happen suddenly. Quoting the biologist E.O. Wilson, she said, ‘the descent [of stressed ecosystems] can be unpredictably abrupt … the loss of the keystone species is like a drill accidentally striking a power line. It causes lights to go out all over.’ We might wake up one morning and find that libraries have turned into Internet rooms, with our stacks of books going the way of our card catalogues.
Let me leave you with the notion, then, that reference librarians are key to the survival of libraries themselves. If we have been needed to help a client figure out our library collections, which consist of materials that were hand-picked for their quality and relevance to the community, think of how critical is the need for us now that the client is searching in cyberspace through a boundless collection of mostly unevaluated materials. Ironically, professional staff are being reduced at a time when their expertise is needed more than ever. We should be taking centre stage. And when we do, we will be referring people to whatever subset of the information universe is appropriate for the client of the moment — whether it is in digitised form or paper.
To do this will take cooperation. The precedent for national and international collaboration among libraries is already well established in the technical services functions of the library (for example, in the US cooperative cataloguing was accomplished through the National Union Catalog in the old days, and through systems like OCLC and RLIN today; the MARC format for automated library records is a standard observed throughout the world). So it shouldn’t be a big conceptual leap to think beyond the library walls about information services.
Just as we are meeting our responsibility to make the Internet available to all of our citizens, whether or not they come into the library, we must assume similar responsibility to bring them reference service as well. No one library can successfully do that alone. It will take a coordinated effort. By aggressively and imaginatively repositioning ourselves to provide immediate, interactive point-of-need service to remote users — whether they are in or out of the library, whether the library is open or closed — we will not only be doing right by our clients, but we will also ensure the flourishing of a grand diversity in information resources.