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.