Kovacs, 'Announcements', LIBRES v2n08 (August 1992) URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/libres/libres-v2n08-kovacs-announcements.txt [Volume 2, Number 8 (August 1992)] Dear Colleagues, I hope you all had a wonderful Summer. LIBRES is starting out the Fall 1992 Semester with a full issue. Our hope is that upon reading "Place and Functionality of Reference Service from the Perspective of Quality Management Theory" you will reply with your comments and reactions. Comments and reactions will be digested and distributed in LIBRES 2.9 NOTES & QUERIES section. We have accepted an article for LIBRES 2.9 and will be glad to consider articles/essays/reports for other Fall LIBRES issues. Copyright of LIBRES published items remains the property of the author/poster. Authors/posters may re-publish items previously published in LIBRES. Any use of any LIBRES published item must have the permission of the author/poster. Cordially, Diane K. Kovacs, Editor this month. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1992 18:15:48 EDT Reply-To: "'Library and Information Science Research Electronic Conference'" Sender: "'Library and Information Science Research Electronic Conference'" From: EDITORS@KENTVM.BITNET Subject: LIBRES 2.8 Announcements LIBRES 2.8 Announcements Table of Contents 1. ASIS Metro NY Chapter 1992 Fall Seminar ====================================================================== 1. From: popwin@uu.psi.com -------------------------------------------------------------- The following message has been cross-posted to several lists. Sorry for duplication. _______________________________________________________________ ASIS METRO NY CHAPTER 1992 FALL SEMINAR INFORMATION WITHOUT TOOLS ?? ... encompasses the entire spectrum of communication media. It focuses on the challenge of developing innovative engines to manipulate, retrieve, and manage the large digitized information stores that are being created through new and easy media transformation techniques. Speakers: James Anderson Vice President of Sales, Market Statistics, Inc. "Ease of Data Base Management in the Demographic World" Dr. Rudolph M. Bell Codirector, The Medieval & Early Modern Data Bank Rutgers University "The Banking of History" Dr. Dennis Egan Director, Information Science Research, Bellcore "Creating and Using the CORE Electronic Library" Colin McQuillan Manager, GE Investments Research Library "Optical Information Systems: Image Or Reality?" Terry Russo Research Associate Paintings Conservation Dept., Metropolitan Museum of Art "Electronic Imaging in Paintings Conservation at the Metropolitan Museum" Dr. Jocelyn Penny Small Manager, Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae Rutgers University "The US Database of Classical Iconography: Issues of Simplicity and Complexity in Design" Dr. Jane Stone Collections Infromation Systems Manager Metropolitan Museum of Art "Essential Elements of Text-based Museum Collections Information Systems" DATE: SEPT 11, 1992 (FRIDAY) TIME: 10:00 A.M. - 4:00 P.M. LOCATION: IBM BUILDING 590 MADISON AVENUE NEW YORK CITY (NE CORNER OF 57TH & MADISON) Mail Reservations: At the Door: ----------------- ----------- Members $60.00 $70.00 Non-members $75.00 $90.00 Students $25.00 $30.00 (Lunch is included) Mailed reservations are encouraged. No cash at the door. Please make checks payable to - asis Metro NY - and forward with the registration form by August 28 to: Joe DeFalco c/o asis Metro NY Chapter 471 East 16th Street Brooklyn, NY 11226 (718) 802-2370 ----------------------------------------------------------------- REGISTRATION FROM Name:___________________________________________________________ Organization:___________________________________________________ Address:________________________________________________________ Phone:______________________ E-Mail:__________________________ ASIS Member __ Non-Member __ Student __ ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1992 18:43:48 EDT Reply-To: "'Library and Information Science Research Electronic Conference'" Sender: "'Library and Information Science Research Electronic Conference'" From: EDITORS@KENTVM.BITNET Subject: LIBRES 2.8 Feature Article LIBRES 2.8 Feature Article Place and Functionality of Reference Services from the Perspective of Total Quality Management Theory. (320 lines) by Alfred Willis and Eugene E. Matysek, Jr. *Copyright 1992 Alfred Willis and Eugene E. Matysek, Jr. ======================================================================== Place and Functionality of Reference Services from the Perspective of Quality Management Theory Alfred Willis Architecture Library Kent State University Eugene E. Matysek, Jr. Special Assistant for Total Quality Management Defense Fuel Supply Center Theoretically, the quantity of reference services provided by a library may be regarded as an index of the inefficiency with which the library is operating. At the same time, the provision of reference services can arguably perpetuate existing inefficiencies in the library's operation and even exacerbate them. In any library, the general process to be carried on is that of putting specific, concrete embodiments of informative material ("information packets," such as books, journals, sound recordings, maps, microfilms, output from machine-readable data files, etc.) into the hands of individual patrons in response to particular queries. In a library operating under a self- help paradigm, patrons define their queries for themselves and answer these queries by locating first the library, then the optimally relevant information packets available in or through that library. In libraries operating under a patron-assisted paradigm, patrons request specific information packets which are then retrieved by their surrogates on the library staff (e.g., pages). One or the other of these paradigms (or perhaps some combination of both of them) provides the organizational model for virtually all modern American academic and public libraries. In either case, patron satisfaction is a function of the degree to which the general library process operates effectively. Any process can be described as a series of events progressively moving forward over time to produce products or services for a customer. The principal elements of the general library process are easily identified. The customers of this process are the patrons of the library. The inputs to the process are acquired, cataloged, and properly stored information packets whose topics cover a determined area of human knowledge. The outputs of the process are the information packets a library's customers retrieve or receive on various occasions in response to their queries. Library management undertakes the task of producing access to these packets, i.e., of assuring the ongoing movement of information packets through a library's physical space to its customers at optimal rates of both effectiveness and efficiency. This task is complex, and typically involves a labor force divided into several departmental contingents, one of which commonly consists of a cadre of more or less full-time reference librarians. In contemporary American academic and public libraries, the need for reference librarians is almost always taken for granted. An analysis of the general library process would suggest, however, that far from being a necessary component of such a process functioning at optimal efficiency, much if not all reference service actually functions as a corrective for occasional processual inefficiencies. In an optimally functioning library, information packets are selected and acquired at optimal efficiency. It will therefore possess exactly the right books, journals, databases, etc., that patrons will require, and these items will be delivered to the library quickly (or otherwise supplied, as in the case of online services, without interruption). It will catalog the information packets it acquires quickly and accurately. These items will thus be correctly described in the library's records, they will receive correct and full subject analysis, and to each of their records all relevant descriptive and subject headings will be assigned. The optimally functioning library will maintain its catalog in such a way that it will be usable by patrons with a modicum of knowledge of its purpose and nature. The library will also take steps to teach the mastery of that knowledge. The library will store its information packets optimally (quickly and accurately), so that patrons will find each one in its proper place. The sympathetic positioning of correctly functioning equipment for accessing "disembodied information" (e.g., CD-ROM players) is tantamount to storing more traditional information packets (e.g., books) in proper order. All mobile information packets (i.e., internally or externally circulating items) will be returned to their proper places as quickly and accurately as possible after each displacement. Furthermore, in order to operate at all, the optimally functioning library's facility must be open, clearly arranged, free of cumbersome barriers, well lighted, and appropriately climate- controlled. Its electronic equipment will be maintained in good working order and kept functioning without unplanned interruptions.... In an optimally functioning library, a patron with a modicum of knowledge of its organizational scheme (or the patron's surrogate) should, without the assistance of a reference librarian and without undue delay, be able to retrieve or receive the most suitable information packets required to answer a given query. But in real life, of course, patrons in self-help libraries are not able to retrieve exactly the right information packet responding to their queries in minimal time, every time. Instead, they experience more or less frequent failures of the library process. In patron- assisted libraries also, patrons experience similar failures. In such events, patrons are often encouraged to seek the assistance of reference librarians. If a library failure is attributable to the library's failure to acquire the best source answering to a particular query, a reference librarian may be asked to suggest alternative sources. In so far as these sources are qualitatively inferior, harder to use, or more expensive to access (e.g., via interlibrary loan), the reference librarian cannot actually correct the failure but can only mitigate its effects. If a library failure is attributable to the library's failure to catalog the best source properly (e.g., used incorrect cataloging copy without editing it to remove significant errors in headings) or quickly, the reference librarian might be asked to imagine alternate retrieval strategies (e.g., through elaborate Boolean keyword searching of the catalog). Failing this, the reference librarian might suggest an alternative source. If a library failure is attributable to the library's failure to store the best source in its proper place (e.g., retained a shelver without adequate knowledge of the call-number system), again the reference librarian might be asked to suggest an alternative source. In all such cases, reference work appears as a quality-control sub-process at the end of one or more failed library sub-processes. It occurs then in reaction to the consequences that the failed sub-process(es) have for patrons, i.e., unacceptable products of the library process as a whole. Admittedly, libraries often invite their patrons to consult a reference librarian before a failure occurs. In that case (when a library's staff, management, and patrons have all come to expect failures in service as a matter of routine), reference service appears as a prophylactic rather than as a corrective. But whether it operates before the fact or after the fact to reverse or mitigate the effects on a patron of an anticipated or actual library failure, in so far as it operates only on failed products of the general library process and not on the process itself, the work involved in reference service is of a nature entirely different from that of the value-adding work carried out in most other library departments. It is bibliographers, technical-services personnel, and document-delivery staff who assure the functioning of the really crucial sub-processes in a library. It is they who can contribute the basic, value-added functions of selection, acquisition, cataloging, shelving, final packaging, etc. Theirs are the sub- processes that cannot be eliminated without eliminating the library altogether; the sub-processes which do break down due to understaffing, poor equipment, lack of training, etc., hence causing the problems for patrons that reference librarians typically try to solve, but whose efficiencies library management must be concerned with optimizing. One obstacle to the optimization of sub-processual efficiency in any system, including libraries, is the scarcity of fiscal resources available for investment in strategic improvement in one or another value-adding sub-process. The significance of this obstacle is exacerbated to the extent that organizations spend any proportion of their resources on value-reducing efforts -- however effective they may be -- to correct quality flaws found in their products. Quality-control processes are inherently costly. They comprise reactions to problems rather than constructive improvements to failing or failed processes. Because quality- control processes are therefore the least cost-effective components of any system, eliminating them holds the greatest promise for reducing system costs. Conversely, investing in improvements to the value-adding sub-processes of a system holds the greatest promise for its functional amelioration. In a library, optimizing the value- adding sub-processes of acquisitions, cataloging, facilities maintenance, etc., obviously should minimize the need for the quality control typically provided by reference services. Although increasing investment in a library's administrative and technical sub-processes thus clearly holds the greatest promise both for enhancing its effectiveness and for reducing its costs by reducing the likelihod or incidence of processual failures, increasing investment in reference services is generally easier to justify. Increasing investment in reference services is especially easy to justify in a library already functioning sub-optimally, where the sub-optimal functioning itself will generate in the patron population a constant demand for corrective reference assistance. The justification will quite literally materialize itself, in the bodies of patrons who, having experienced library failures, line up in growing numbers before the reference desk to request assistance. Strictly speaking, it is the number of such patrons that is the index of a library's processual inefficiency. But in so far as a library commits fiscal and human resources to reference services in the expectation that those services could make up in effectiveness what was lost to patrons through inefficiency, the quantity of reference services provided becomes, by extension and proportionally, itself the index. The danger for library management in accepting uncritically any proposed justification for continued or even increased reference services, however, is considerable -- especially in those libraries operating with finite human resources (i.e., all libraries?) and consequently forced to finance the proposed quality-control efforts out of savings in those departments charged with the execution of the inherently value- adding sub-processes. In such a case, increasing investment in reference services would be expected to lead to increasing degradation of the general library process, and ultimately to the total collapse of the library system. SOME PERTINENT LITERATURE Crosby, Philip B._Quality is Free_ New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983. Deming, W. Edwards._Out of the Crisis_ Cambridge, MA: MIT Center for Advanced Engineering Study, 1982. Taylor, Robert S. _Value-Added Processes in Information Systems_ Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1986. White, Herbert S. "The Value-Added Process of Librarianship."_Library Journal_114 (January 1989): 62-63. Wormell, Irene, ed._Information Quality: Definitions and Dimensions_ London: Taylor Graham, 1990. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1992 18:49:26 EDT Reply-To: "'Library and Information Science Research Electronic Conference'" Sender: "'Library and Information Science Research Electronic Conference'" From: EDITORS@KENTVM.BITNET Subject: LIBRES 2.8 Notes & Queries LIBRES 2.8 Notes & Queries Table of Contents 1.COMPUTER ETHICS CURRICULUM KIT (30 lines) ====================================================================== 1. From: Walter Maner TEACHING SOCIAL AND ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF COMPUTING: A "STARTER KIT" The Research Center on Computing and Society at Southern Connecticut State University and Educational Media Resources, Inc. (a not-for-profit organization specializing in educational programming) have assembled a "Starter Kit" for teachers who wish to introduce social and ethical implications of computing into their computer science or computer engineering classes. The "Kit" can also help computer science departments fulfill national accreditation requirements (CSAC/CSAB). The "Starter Kit" includes three video tapes and two monographs: VIDEO TAPES: No. 1--Teaching Computing and Human Values (45 min.) No. 2--What Is Computer Ethics (45 min.) No. 3--Examples and Cases in Computer Ethics (45 min.) MONOGRAPHS: No. 1--Teaching Computer Ethics (110 pages) No. 2--Computing and Social Responsibility: A Collection of Course Syllabi (142 pages) Further information is available from the Research Center on Computing and Society at Southern Connecticut State University: E-Mail: RCCS@SCSU.CTSTATEU.EDU Phone: (203) 397-4423 (Center and answering machine) FAX: (203) 397-4681