Friday, June 9, 2006, 9:07:34 AM, you wrote:
WH> I think a librarians mission has changed. Even a few years ago it was to get as much
WH> information as possible for our patrons. Now, with the information explosion, our role
WH> is more to help filter out irrelevant information. It's easy now, to bury patrons with
WH> stuff. But should we?
Actually, I don't think it has changed. We've always had cases where
we needed to help users expand their searching. I run into that most
frequently when a patrons wants info on something like "Albanian
underwater basketweaving" and can't find a book on it. Big surprise.
They often think that the catalog will lead them to the information,
even if topic is a small part of a book on basketweaving, or Albanian
culture and art, or on underwater recreation. We then get them
looking for info on one of those topics and digging from there. Of
course when the instructor insists that they find a BOOK on their
topic....
We've also always had to deal with narrowing things down. I think
we'll always get the ones like my standard example of a freshman, who
is writing a term paper (5-7 pages) on abortion and needs "at least
three articles and one book". We'll always try to narrow her down by
asking "do you want the medical aspects, the legal, the ethical, the
psychological, etc." Unfortunately the usual answer is "I don't care,
just abortion", at which point I'll give up until she finds the
hundreds of books and tens of thousands of articles and comes back for
more help (or doesn't).
So, to me, this is nothing new....same stuff, different day, different
technology.
Final thought on this. I took Reference in 1964. There was a little
39 page book we used as part of the course:
Patrons are people;
how to be a model librarian.
Author: Wallace, Sarah Leslie, 1914-1988.
Publication: Chicago, American Library Association, 1956
It used many cartoons as illustrations, and I've always remembered one
where it shows a patron asking something like "What is the capitol of
Albania" and the librarian coming back with an armload of books of all
sorts.
Again, same stuff different day
dan
--
Dan Lester, Data Wrangler dan_at_RiverOfData.com 208-283-7711
3577 East Pecan, Boise, Idaho 83716-7115 USA
www.riverofdata.com The Road Goes On Forever....
Received on Fri Jun 09 2006 - 13:16:39 EDT