4B: Reading Reflections

“What is Reference For?” is an article written by Joseph Janes for the Reference Services Review Journal. It was an interesting read. It was published in 2003, yet the concerns it still raises are current concerns today. I don’t know why this is. I think that it has been aptly demonstrated that libraries and reference librarians are not going anywhere in the future. As I always say, and have previously blogged, they will always be needed. In 2003, the author talks about how “reference services are about to enter a new golden age brimming with new ways to serve people of all kinds using technologies new and old, helping them to connect with information resources they need or want.” (page 22). He then says how some believe that reference librarianship is dying. Well, librarianship is not dying, and we have already entered the new golden age. Libraries are consistently finding new and better ways to stay in the game and be useful to the community. And yet people still think libraries are becoming obsolete. I don’t understand why 13 years later, they are still espousing the same things. Why hasn’t the scholarship concerning these issues changed already? More than 13 years of the same kind of research seems to me to be a little bit on the long side. In other fields of research, they would have already moved onto something else.  

It was interesting to read that in the 1950s, the question plaguing libraries was how to deal with phone calls. That phone calls were a new thing then, and librarians didn’t know if the phone callers were more important than the ones who were currently at their desk. I don’t know what the rules are in other libraries, but in mine, people who are present take precedence over anybody who calls on the phone. Unless the person at the desk has already been with the reference librarian for a long time. That’s when I sometimes see the librarian helping someone on the phone instead.

4A: Reflection on Class 9-20-16

Shevon, our school’s librarian, visited us again in class. She further discussed with us reference sources that we can find online. There was a lot of talk about databases which I found to be boring. I was bored because I already knew about some of them and know how to navigate them. She did talk a little bit about Boolean operators, which I hate. No matter how many different words I use, I never get good results. An example is when searching in our library catalog for King Arthur books that I needed. Whatever I searched for, I would only generate a few hits of what books would be useful to me. Then when I went down into the stacks to find those three hits, lo and behold! There would be at least another three books that would be useful to me that had never generated in the search results!? Even though I know about this stuff and try different words all the time, I can never get good results. The same thing happened when I visited the graduate library during an info session about grad school. I saw a whole bunch of King Arthur books that would have been useful for my thesis, yet they never showed up in the catalog.

                Shevon explained how Boolean operators worked. I knew that putting quotes around words would mean that those words would be kept together, and I understood that “and” and “or” meant you would get a search result containing both search words if you used “and” and you would either get one or the other if you used “or”, but I had no idea how the parenthesis worked. Finally, I understand! An example that she used were the search terms “political parties” and “voting”. Searching for Donald Trump AND (“political parties” OR “voting”) will generate results for sources that mentioned both Donald Trump and political parties or both Donald Trump and voting, but it wouldn’t give you results that mentioned Donald Trump, political parties, and voting all together at the same time.

                I did learn some interesting and useful information though sometimes I was kind of bored. I learned that back in the day, using Google or Google Scholar was actually a bad thing. People didn’t trust Google Scholar when it first came out and a lot of professors didn’t want to get caught looking at it. It’s very hard to believe considering how important Google services are now and how heavily they are used. I guess Wikipedia took its place.

                I also learned that though databases say “abstracts” in their name, it’s a legacy title. The databases used to only contain abstracts, and not articles, but now that is not true. I wish I had actually known this years ago!

3B: Reflection on Readings

In “Personal Relations between Librarians and Readers” by Samuel S. Green, he writes about how people who are in positions of authority, such as professors and scholars, are not afraid to come into a library and tell the workers exactly what they need or are looking for, whereas those who don’t possess authority, such as students, are very timid and shy when asking for help (sometimes they have to be prompted to ask for something). I have experienced this first hand many times. The only time professors are timid is when they are brand new, or have never used the library before, like when putting a book on course reserve or checking a book out. Then there are some professors or public patrons (not affiliated with the university) who like to give everybody a hard time, especially the student workers, and sometimes even staff or librarians. I have diffused many situations over the years in which someone was irate at a student worker or one of my coworkers. I intervene exactly how it says to act in “Zingerman’s Guide to Giving Great Service”. I apologize and am calm and do everything I can to make the patron happy. What I have noticed is that the next time they come in, they come right to me to take care of something for them, or they will ask for me if I’m not there. Sometimes I have run into them in the hallway, or they come in to the library when I’m there, and mention to me that they had been looking for me the other day. With students, the more you interact with them, the more confident they become. I have also seen how patrons will have a favorite reference librarian, and will come back later if their favorite is not currently sitting at the reference desk. These experiences of mine support what Green says, “a hearty reception by a sympathizing friend, and the recognition of some one at hand who will listen to inquiries…make it easy for such persons to ask questions, and put them at once on home footing.” (page 74)

The author goes on to discuss all sorts of scenarios of how a reference librarian can assist patrons with all sorts of questions and always point them in the right direction to the sources that will help them in their research. Sometimes they have to teach the patrons how to do research for themselves. This fosters important personal relationships between librarians and patrons. The help librarians give to patrons causes “conviction [to spread] through the community that the library is an institution of such beneficent influences that it can not be dispensed with.” (page 78-79).What the author discusses supports exactly what I said earlier in another blog: libraries aren’t going anywhere and neither are reference librarians because people will always need them.

The speech Melvil Dewey gave, titled “Libraries as Related to the Educational Work of the State”, was an enjoyable read. He was imploring the state of New York to support libraries as part of their educational system. It must have been something to have heard the speech in person. He is very eloquent and seems like he was a funny guy.

In his speech, Dewey discusses the differences between the old and new ways of the library. He states how the “old type of librarian was a crabbed and unsympathetic fossil…and a reader among his books was as unwelcome as the proverbial poor relation on a long visit” (page 3). I laughed when I read the fossil part. I think that some librarians are probably still like this though. But that’s because they are the ones who are the archivist of a library, and have in their possession books that are hundreds of years old, and could easily be destroyed by a careless person.

Dewey states that the new version of the library is important to education because after graduating from school, education still should continue in one’s lifetime, and the library enables this continued learning throughout one’s life. He concludes the speech with saying that the state of New York should recognize and support libraries because “then again shall she wear her crown of leadership” (page 16). If they don’t decide to support the libraries, then other states will choose to do so and surpass the state of New York in educational matters. He closes with “it is to-day your high privilege to lead. To-morrow it may be your bounden duty to follow” (page 16). What a way to stroke people’s vanity. I don’t know how anybody wouldn’t be convinced by his speech. I was; it was very persuasive and full of great supporting arguments.