Green, 'Information Reverberations', LIBRES v4n01 (February 28, 1994) URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/libres/libres-v4n01-green-information.txt LIBRES: Library and Information Science Research Electronic Journal __________________________________________________________________ ISSN 1058-6768 February 28, 1994 Volume 4 Issue 1 Quarterly LIBRE4N1 GREEN Section Editor's note: With this issue I introduce our second LIBRES columnist. Kathy Green is Head of Reference Services at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. Kathy's columns will address some of the many challenges that technology creates for librarianship. Keith Morgan Essays and Opinions Editor kamorgan@mit.edu ************************** _Information Reverberations_ by Kathy Green "Reference encounters of a different kind" Imagine: Your library has recently launched reference service via electronic mail. It's an attempt to be responsive to a community increasingly networked and aware of the powers of information technology. You are a little apprehensive, having no way of predicting the demand for the service. After a slow start, the service begins to become popular with faculty, and then with students. Logging on one afternoon, you find this question: "Please explain when and how Egypt attained independence as a nation." The "when" aspect of the question should be easy you think; the "how" is another matter, especially if you know much about Egyptian political history. You expected the "when" type questions--those requiring brief factual answers--when you introduced the service. You worried about the inquiries needing more than a short response. "Is this my job?" you ask yourself. "How would I answer this if it were a telephone caller's question?" "Even if a patron presented herself at the reference desk, would I go so far as to find the information, and neatly summarize it?" You become uneasy. This is new. Is this what will be increasingly expected of you--to deliver digested, packaged information? Is this what they're talking about in the endless stream of articles about the changing role of librarians? Where will you find the time to provide answers like this on a regular basis? Where will you get the expertise to interpret the contents of the resources you routinely point out to others? You answer the question, summarizing the pages of information you find in a well-thumbed reference book as best you can, suggesting the user come to the library for a fuller explanation, adding a few citations to books in the local collection that may also be helpful. You feel some satisfaction with your detailed and complete answer. The patron is enormously grateful. Somehow, though, you are still uneasy. Should you set this sort of precedent? What would your colleagues think of your answer? You begin to worry you've just provided the patron with an answer to a take-home exam. The future is now, as they say, and not so slowly and somewhat surely, it is changing the way we do business in libraries. There are some who would suggest that you, as the librarian in the above scenario, have made the first step onto higher ground for the profession, the elevated plain of the new information professional as consultant and deliverer of just-in-time, customized, packaged, value-added information. Others would be horrified. "We're not slaves!" "We can't encourage this level of user expectation!" "Why should remote users get better service than those who take the trouble to walk through our doors!" "Students won't learn anything." You may think I exaggerate the responses to the above scenario; I assure you, not by much. Although we haven't yet seen much of it in the literature, the concerns are there, voiced, worrisome, unanswered. Granted, you won't hear those arguments from many special librarians; they've had a lot of experience on that elevated plain. Special librarians have a reputation for being well-compensated for their efforts (when they're not being laid off, but that's a different column), encourage high levels of user expectation, may be more accustomed to dealing with remote users, and don't neccesarily expect their clientele to learn how to find information on their own. And that's the kicker. At the core of the debate arising out of our new opportunities for providing information is a conflict with regard to our collective mission as academic librarians, a waffling in our dual roles as educational and service organizations. Are we here to teach researchers independent information-seeking habits for a lifetime? Or is it our job to provide what the patron wants, when and where the patron wants it? As my colleague, Marilyn Lary, pointed out in the last issue of LIBRES, patron information seeking habits in part determine what libraries buy (MasterPlots, for example) and the services we provide (evening and weekend reference assistance). In quality management lingo, they call such efforts "delighting," or even "dazzling" the customer. How far should we go? Our current efforts would indicate that we haven't gone far enough. We want to be helpful, certainly, and so we unleash our collective energy on countless tours of our confusing buidings, bibliographic instruction sessions, and point-of-use instruction. Our intentions are the best, but we are worried that our efforts may be less than welcome, that students are too easily frustrated when their questions aren't quickly and easily answered, and if we listen to the futuristic technotypes, that we are doomed to extinction. If we spend our time bemoaning lazy students looking only for the quick fix, the easy way out, a free ride, then we are, in my mind, blaming the victims. These are the dissatisfied customers, and we, despite our best efforts to the contrary, are part of the source of dissatisfaction. They have always wanted their information quickly, and painlessly. They were satisfied looking through paper indexes twenty years ago, because there was little recourse. They now want to use InfoTrac for papers on Chaucer if no other electronic source exists, because it more readily meets their need of easily retrieved information. As librarians we've been for years responding to only the "information" part of that need and now, under the harsh glare of technology, our shortcomings and flaws are becoming ever more visible, ever more unacceptable. But at what point do we know better than the undergraduate in a hurry? Are we to lose our role as educators? How do we reconcile our notion of ourselves as teachers with the fact that not every patron wants a close encounter with a reference librarian? I don't have easy answers for every question posed by an undergraduate who's waited until the last minute to start a term paper, and as well, I don't have them for a dilemma that muddles the clarity of our professional vision. In both cases, the best I can do is to provide sympathy and suggestions for a number of options. For the undergraduate, I'll suggest options for the best sources of information, with apologies if it isn't also quick, and for the quickest. I will let her decide which to use, and withhold judgement if she chooses MasterPlots over the genuine article. For academic librarians, I suggest that we step up our attempts to find out what our patrons need and respond to them. We will need to continue to replace cherished print resources with easier-to-use, though far from perfect electronic ones. We most assuredly will have to find resources to deliver a variety of information services to remote locations. And more than occasionally, patrons will ask us to teach them about the best resources, no matter what their format. The most difficult step in the process of finding out what users need, however, will be giving up our assumptions, about what they need, and what we think is good for them. It means truly adopting a philosophy that the customer is always right. Even when we think we know better. ************************* _____ Articles and Sections of this issue of _LIBRES: Library and Information Science Research Electronic Journal_ may be retrieved via anonymous ftp to cc.curtin.edu.au or via e-mail message addressed to LISTSERV@KENTVM or LISTSERV@KENTVM.KENT.EDU (instructions below) Papers may be submitted at anytime by email or send/file to: Diane K. 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