Reference Questions, Wordled

I am catching up on my blogs and just read Swiss Army Librarian's Sept. 29 post “Cloud of Survey Comments from Library Patrons.” His library did a word cloud based on comments in their recent patron survey, which he shows in his post.

I joked in the comments about doing a Wordle on our recent reference interactions ... and was pleased at how simple it was to set up. I think this will be a good way of showing non-library folks what we do in libraries: help answer questions ... and help folks print. Also, we refer people other places when we can't answer their question or don't have what they need. Note how big the word "chat" is; that's because we code all of our LibraryH3lp / chat reference notes with the word "chat."

Thanks to DeskTracker for the ability to easily download our reference interactions; I simply copied & pasted the comments field into a text file, which I then pasted into Wordle to generate this graphic. The most time-consuming part was standardizing questions and Question to "question" ... and removing the word "patron" since after standardization, it would have been twice the size of the word help!

I was a bit worried that this exercise would violate patron confidentiality, but it doesn't seem to, for two reasons: first, we don't put any personal information in our comments field, and second, because the text of over 600 transactions is in this Wordle, so details like "Times-Picayune" or "HBR Case Studies" doesn't show up.

"User Services" ... or helping people in an academic library

My thoughts on User Services, or providing services to patrons in an academic library are many ... and I've just discussed them with students in Barbara Moran's Academic Libraries class at UNC's School of Information and Library Science. Notably, I am an embedded librarian, which is to say that I work where my patrons work. The Park Library is on the second floor of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, making contact with students and faculty very easy.

Beyond the location, I think about this work in terms of who I am helping, and so have organized the talk around these constiuent groups:

1. Undergraduate patrons. They are first because they are so numerous! The School of Journalism and Mass Communication has roughly 800 undergraduates, and I work with them in many ways:
   


• Instruction. In the academic year 2010-2011, I have taught or will teach a total of 33 classes, reaching about 600 students. Courses include Case Studies in Public Relations, African American Newspapers, History of Broadcasting, Law of Cyberspace, Magazine Writing & Editing, and Undergraduate Honors. I've taught two entry-level classes for MA and PhD students. You can see the full range at my course guides page.
  
  
• Face-to-face / synchronous reference. I get most of my reference business from faculty referrals or from having taught students in class. The majority of the questions are in person, but several come via our LibraryH3lp chat sessions. In the calendar year 2010, my staff and I answered almost 800 in-person or chat questions from users, mostly reference, but many directional and technical questions as well. I detailed my theories of reference back in 2008, and they're still holding up.


• The Library's website is an important component of my outreach, especially to undergraduates. I redesigned the website in summer 2010. It was intended to promote material I think undergraduates should use most (like Academic Search Premier and Communication & Mass Media Complete) -- I used a green star on the main page to highlight the really important databases.


• I promote the library via Twitter and least 85 undergraduates following me back. Check out my Twitter favorites for a sense of the library promotion I do via Twitter.


• I do my best to make the library a comfortable place to study, allowing food and beverages and offering PCs, Macs, wireless along with tables for solitary or group study.
  
2. Faculty colleagues. I collaborate with my faculty colleagues quite a bit on teaching the courses I mentioned above.
   


• I make it a point to attend faculty meetings and other gatherings of faculty. I want to be available in case they have questions for me. Often I see someone in the hall who says "oh, I've been meaning to ask you about Blah Blah Blah," and I know it's my presence that reminds them of their information need-- and the question gets answered. Additionally, it's important to be aware of what they are thinking about. It's good to know about new hires, because I can do collection development in a new area (always fun), and it's useful to know about curriculum changes or other elements of their daily work life. My role is to think about how I can help them do their work better or more efficiently.


• I've been intrigued by conversations with John Dupuis, who blogs at Confessions of a Science Librarian. We've been cyber buddies for a few years and have met at two ScienceOnline conferences in RTP. Dupuis recently blogged about stealth librarianship, whereby we infiltrate (my word) ourselves into the work lives of our faculty colleages. Dupuis strongly believes we should step away from being so library-focused and "collaborate with faculty in presentations" and "...we must make our case to our patrons on their turf, not make our case to ourselves on our own turf." There are some interesting additional opinions at the In the Library with the Lead Pipe blog: Lead Pipe Debates the Stealth Librarianship Manifesto.


• John's challenge to SILS students is: comment on his blog (at a mininum) or write your own manifesto.


• I would like to collaborate with my faculty and publish in the JOMC literature about how librarian / faculty collaborations can be effective. This is one of my 2011 goals!
  


3. Fellow librarians. That said, it's important to collaborate and cross-pollinate with our librarian colleagues as well. I was happy to have the time and energy this year to participate in Library Day in the Life #6 (see my #libday6 tweets here). I reported my daily tasks for my fellow librarians and was pleased to read about their daily tasks as well. I also participated as a way of demonstrating that librarians don't just sit quietly in the library and read and shelve. Some of the tasks I did that week:
• Staff meeting
• Future tweeting via Hootsuite
• Met with a professor about teaching her PR Campaigns students to improve their research skills
• Resolved a question regarding delivery of SRDS Circulation, an annual publication about newspaper circulation
• Showed a student how to use RefWorks
• Showed a student worker how to prepare serials for binding
  
• Tried to figure out PubMed for the PR Campaigns class.
  
• Got help with PubMed from a fellow UNC librarian also participating in libday6.
• Met a fellow Mount Holyoke librarian at UNC who was also participating in libday6.
  
• Weeded some of our book collection
  
• Looked at long-term web analytics for library website.
  


4. The Boss. I give my boss (Jean Folkerts, dean of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication) all of the above information and more. I want her to know what I'm doing and what my staff are doing. I prepare gobs of data for her, which is how I knew how many reference interactions we had in 2010 and how many classes I've taught so far this academic year. Want more data? In 2010, we circulated over 1,400 items, and our patrons requested over 700 titles from libraries elsewhere on campus. My assistant (JOMC graduate Megan Garrett) has added over 1,800 titles to the catalog in the last year. There's more data still, but I'll stop now.

The overarching theme of my services to patrons is: be where users are and stand ready to help them. I offer help in person or in class, as well as through the library website. Further, I promote the library, and back it up with solid work. I talk-talk-talk about the terrific services we offer and I back it up by offering terrific services. It's an awesome job!

What Can You Ask a Librarian?

A recent Library Hacks blog post at Duke's Perkins Library, Ever wonder what you can ask a reference librarian? prompted me to publicize some of the questions we've been asked at the Park Library. (I first posted this on the JoMC Park Library blog but thought it would be fun over here too)

Recent questions include (along with answers, where feasible):

Basic Questions, students asked for ...

• Communication Yearbook by call number. (check the catalog)
• Dissertations by former JoMC students (online! from 1997-present in ProQuest Dissertations & Theses full-text *)
• Related: looking for a MA thesis by a former JoMC student (list is online)
• How to request books from another library (Carolina BLU rocks!).
• Printing, printing, printing! Lots of questions about printing. We currently don't have the "free" ITS printers anywhere in Carroll Hall, and we answer lots of questions about that.

More Complex Questions, where folks asked for ...

• Alcohol advertisements from the late 1960s to present (Duke's Ad*Access is a great start, as are some of the other resources on this page)
• Editorial cartoons (this research page can help)
• An article from the Los Angeles Times from 1984 (we have the LA Times from 1881-1986 *& the most recent 6 months in LexisNexis *)
• Tough one: readership of southern, American newspapers in the mid-1800s. We found some material in books and other old-fashioned sources.
• Industry surveys of the motorcycle industry (I love these market research resources!)
• Articles from North Carolina newspapers about an event that took place in southeastern NC in the mid-80s to mid-90s. The papers the patron needed weren't on microfilm ... helped her find the appropriate microfilm source and identify specific dates via the Charlotte Observer (available from 1985-present in America's Newspapers *)

Many of these links will work regardless of your institutional affiliation. The links followed by an * are available to the UNC community only.

The library staff and I are happy to answer questions about doing research in journalism & mass communication. You can reach me by email (swbrown @ unc . edu), by phone at 919.843.8300, IM to JoMCParkLib, and now you can even text Qs to us at 919-200-0713.

Ask us anything!

The Reference Interview, Stereotypically

The librarians at UT Arlington are at it again -- if I were still teaching reference, I'd show this video to start a discussion of the reference interview.

Online Reading List Creation Tool? Not!

I'm teaching reference at Simmons again in the spring, and I am pulling together my reading list. (see the Fall 2007 reading list). That list looked nice and meets most of the criteria I have for a reading list:

• Citations are formatted properly in MLA, and include the name of the database where I got the full-text as well as the date accessed. I am a stickler for good citation style in my classes, and I feel I should model that in the citations I give them.

• The list is sorted on several levels: first by week, then by topic, and then alphabetically by author (or title if there is no author). This is important because I want students to easily know which readings are due when (tho' some find it confusing that you need to read week 2's articles BEFORE week 2's class), and under what topic.

The downside of this kind of list is that it's complex to maintain. It starts with the citation, which I email to myself, paste into a FileMaker database and fix the metadata, and then export with correctly formatted html, and then paste into the html file, which is finally uploaded to the Simmons server. phew! I'm tired just writing all that out!

It's been 18 months since I taught reference, and I thought there must be a better way. Ideally, I wanted a two-step process to export from the article to the bibliography: 1) find the article and 2) export to bibliography -- while maintaining good MLA citation style and complex sort order. My options seemed infinite, with so many bookmarking and social networking citation sites available. Sadly, none met all my criteria, so I'm back to manually coding my html file.

Here's what I tried. The links go to a few sample articles I wanted to share with my class, along with notes about why each product didn't meet my needs:

RefWorks

• On the plus side:
• It's RefWorks, which I encourage my students to use during their career at Simmons.
• It's incredibly simple to get citations from EBSCO, CSA, etc. into RefWorks.
• It's possible to create shared folders that anyone can view.
• It's very customizable, with 15 user-defined fields and an infinite number of ways to format citations.
• Simmons' RefWorks is OpenURL-enabled, so it's easy for students to get to the full-text of the article, PLUS they get early familiarity with Simmons' ArticleNow!
• On the minus side:
• The default view for RefWorks' shared folders is not customizable. The metadata doesn't display consistently across document types (article, book, web page), and the Standard View doesn't display in any recognized format (APA, Turabian, MLA). I wrote the company and was told that it is not possible to modify the Standard View.
• The inability to easily display instructions for textbook readings in the Standard View (i.e., chapter number, title, and pages for the chapter, along with the book title) was the straw that broke this camel's back.
  

CiteULike

• On the plus side:
  • Easy (theoretically) to add citations with a bookmarklet.
• Citations are online.
• Easy to add tags.
• On the minus side:
• None of the citations I tried to add through their bookmarklet actually loaded. I tried from Scopus, which is on the CiteULike list of "web sites". EBSCO isn't on their list, so I wasn't surprised that EBSCO citations didn't import automatically. That's a deal-breaker, as a large percentage of my citations are in EBSCO's Library, Information Science, and Technology Abstracts (LISTA) database.
• The ads on the interface are distracting and leave little room for viewing citations.

Connotea

• On the plus side:
  • Includes date and time the citation was added to the database. The downside is that it's not in my time zone.
  • The default is to share citations.
• On the minus side:
• Not possible to automatically add from EBSCO or other Simmons databases; only via their bookmarklet.
• The article's metadata is not added automatically via their bookmarklet. The default is to only display the title with a hyperlink to the article. It's possible to add complete citations, but that requires extra steps -- and the point of this exercise is to save time.
• Lots of red on the page is tiring. Page is kind of cluttered.
• Extra features like "related"articles and links to others who've linked to the same citation are not relevant to a class reading list.

2collab.com

• On the plus side:
  • Clean, simple layout with professional colors.
  • Scopus citations imported easily.
  • Nice tagging.
• On the minus side:
• It works best with Elsevier databases. This is a problem for two reasons:
  • I have access to Scopus through my main job at UConn, but not through Simmons. So any citations I find in Scopus that I want to use for class have the UConn / Scopus URL rather than a Simmons-friendly (i.e., proxied) URL for easy access to the full-text. I'd have to copy & paste the URLs from LISTA for citations that are in Scopus.
  • Scopus doesn't index some of the non scholarly journals, so I had to manually add Stephen Abram's terrific Searcher article Evolution to Revolution to Chaos? Reference in Transition.
• Making articles shared was a two-step process: clicking the "group" box AND agreeing to the pop-up that yes, I do want to share this article.
• Finally, it didn't do well with textbook chapters -- too much manual metadata entry.

I also looked briefly at EBSCO's shared folders and Zotero, but neither seemed easily shareable, so I didn't actually test them. Briefly:

• I love EBSCO's folders, but if you want to share them, you have to email everyone with whom you want to share the folder, and with 21 students in the class, that's too much extra work for moi.
• Zotero's got great potential, but as it is now resident only one one browser, it's not ready for a shared class reading list.

I have used a wiki in the past for my source list (which looks a lot like a reading list, since many of the sources are books, and all need to be properly cited). I asked students to annotate each source on the wiki, and that was terrific. However, I still had to format the citations, both in html and wiki style. For next semester, I have put my sources in delicious, and I will use that both as the source list AND the annotation vehicle.

Back to the software under discussion: Please note that I have assessed these tools to be used as a reading list, which is not exactly what they were designed for. I have taught many UConn students and faculty to use RefWorks, and I will continue to do so. It's great for keeping track of citations. Similarly, the other products I've described have great features for researchers and scholars.

Sadly, though, none is robust enough to serve as the reading list for my upcoming class. I am keeping the list in the "cloud" though, using dropbox for its easy, everywhere access. Take a look at the Spring 2009 reading list -- it's in flux, but you might find something fun to read!

Reference Theory & Practice

I'm thrilled to link to my article on The Reference Interview: Theories and Practice, recently published by Library Philosophy and Practice (LPP). They abstract it thusly:

The reference librarian's task is to translate the patron's question into one that can be answered with the library's resources. The first element of that task is to know what the patron wants; the second is to know what resources the library has and how to use them. Reference librarians must learn continuously throughout their careers, both because new resources become available, but also because patrons present questions requiring new resources. This article will focus on how to determine what kind of information the patron needs through the reference interview.

If you're interested in reference, I recommend the article.

And if you speak Albanian, I would suggest you read the first iteration of the article, "Intervista referale: teori dhe praktika," published in Biblioletra in November (pdf of entire issue). The article was originally solicited by my former student and president of the Kosovo Librarians Association Besim Kokollari, and he translated it into Albanian.

For More Information

• Brown, Stephanie Willen. The Reference Interview: Theory and Practice] "Intervista referale: teori dhe praktika," [Article in Albanian] Biblioletra, v4, n2 (2007): 7-11. (pdf of entire issue)
• -- The Reference Interview: Theories and Practice, Library Philosophy and Practice (LPP), February 2008.

the Future of Reference

A colleague (hi Terry!) asked me to speak on a panel in his class about the future of reference. I'm a poor prognosticator (tho' I like to say the word), but I have a few thoughts. Here's a bit of what I said in class:

Even before I talk about the future of reference, I have to comment on how I define "reference." When I think of "reference", I think of "reference SERVICE." I initially focused my thoughts only on service, but finally realized I should probably talk about other elements like search and resources. Always good to know one's own biases.

So, the four things I believe will affect the future of reference are:
- Service
- Search technologies
- the Reference Book
- Money

1. In terms of service, we need to be where the patrons are. This could mean more roving reference (even in a big library) where we go & find them and ask if they are finding what they need. This could (should) mean more technology such as IM, facebook, Skype, and text-messaging -- at least for those tech-savvy patrons. Probably we should work on getting more people to be tech-savvy, in terms of using online resources and communication technology, for those "connected but hassled" patrons.

This implies that reference librarians are still necessary -- and they DEFINITELY are. I taught a class last week in which one student said "I wish I'd known this before I graduated." Breaks my heart when they say that, because I know we can save them time AND help them be smarter about searching. Finding good material will not get easier anytime soon (despite my thoughts about #2), so we will continue to need reference librarians.

2. In terms of search, we MUST make it easier. Roy Tennant famously said "librarians like to search, everyone else likes to find." He also said "2 clicks 2 stuff" (see my blog entry). Two potential ways of making this easier for the non-tech savvy users:

2a. Federated search. This means searching more than one database / library resource at the same time. We can do this already with our EBSCO products, which is applicable if we need to search Communications & Mass Media Complete + PsycINFO at the same time. However, if we were researching the philosophy of mind, for instance, and wanted to search PsycINFO + Philosopher's Index together, we couldn't do that in my library, because we get those resouces from different vendors.

There are several companies which offer federated search products, but, imho, none is ready for prime time. Many technical, legal, and standards problems prevent aggregation of ALL databases into one search engine. And if they're not ALL going to be there, my feeling is we shouldn't do it. Here's why: if a major newspaper vendor is missing, for example, and we point students to our MegaOneSearch resource for newspapers which is all newspaper database sources EXCEPT the big one, then to do a comprehensive search patrons would have to search two sources anyway, and that defeats the purpose.

There's a philosophical question as well: does federated search "dumb" things down to such an extent that we are doing our patrons a disservice by teaching them to use a simple search for all databases rather than pointing them to the best database for their topic?

Finally, the federated search interface must be intuitive to use. I have seen products that confuse me -- and if I don't know what to do, a college freshperson, soccer mom, or the "Inexperienced Experimenter" will not, and will go back to Google.



2b. A different approach to the federated search problem is the "data silo + search + presentation" method adopted by such vendors as Ex Libris' Primo. Currently, if a patron wants to find books, articles, and archival material on his topic, he must search at least three different places, with varying interfaces, quirks, and search rules: the library's catalog (which I've taken to calling "Google for books"), a library database such as Academic Search Premier, and the library's digital archive or finding aids collection. This is so confusing for patrons that they'd rather search Google because it's "good enough."

The premise of Primo is that all data elements (catalog data, digital archives, aggregated data in a federated search product like MetaLib) can be "harvested" and stored in different "silos." Once harvested and "normalized" so that the disparate information has metadata in consistent fields, it can be searched simultaneously (see the Feb. 15, 2007 Library Journal article (Meta)search Like Google for more about this concept).

Finally, there is a dedicated public interface just for this application. The value to patrons is that the presentation layer is consistent for ALL resources within the library. AND the presentation layer is especially designed to be easy to use and highlight the metadata that we have all worked so hard to add to various records.

Two examples of beautiful, patron-oriented public interfaces are North Carolina State University's catalog (see results of a search for synesethesia -- note how smoothly it handled the typo) which is "fronted" by Endeca, and the Queens Public Library (see results of a search for visual perception), which is TLC's AquaBrowser. You can see how much easier this OPAC would be for "connected but hassled" users!

3. The reference book, one of my long-time library companions, is going by the wayside. It's heartbreaking but true. Fewer patrons come to the reference desk, fewer of them are willing to look at a book, and the majority of them are online wanting online resources. Given that, most of us must put our money in online resources. This is completely understandable, but it means that the intuitive-to-use reference book will go by the wayside and patrons will have to learn not only about their topic in an online reference work, they will also have to learn how to use the interface. There is some great reference content online, and while some interfaces are better than others, none is as intuitive as a book.

4. A huge element in the future of reference is money. Money for staff, money for cool products like federated search and Primo, and money for materials. Which sends me to my recent rant on marketing -- if we don't get people into the library, the folks who pay for our services (town hall, university presidents, school departments) will think that their constituents can use Google for everything & don't need libraries. We need to at least keep the $$ we have, or better yet, increase what we're pulling in and use it wisely.

So, in conclusion, here's the future of reference:
1. We still need reference librarians, but they should be where the patrons are, either physically or virtually.
2. We need to make search easier for patrons. Federated search & Primo (theoretically) will enable people to find stuff more quickly and easily.
3. Fewer reference books, more online reference materials. Hopefully easier to use (see #2).
4. Less money, fewer cool librarians, less cool stuff. Money properly allocated means good librarians & *useful* relevant resources for patrons.

It was a great discussion in class. Hopefully others will chime in?!

Addendum to Thoughts about Reference

My thoughts on this topic are evolving, and there are so many related blog posts about it, that I've created a separate post for my links & additional thoughts on The Future of Reference.

In no particular order:

* From the 2007 Massachusetts Library Association Conference Blog, all posts tagged with reference. Starts with a roundtable discussion entitled "Is Reference Dead?" and "Radical Reference: Community Librarianship and Free/Open Source Technology", with Jenna Freedman and Eric Goldhagen.

* Aaron's Walking Paper blog comments on the Chronicle of Higher Education article Are Reference Desks Dying Out?

* SomeLibrarian talks indirectly about the changing role of reference at his Some Librarian blog in a post about using facebook with students, and another about Librarian with Latte.

* John Ramsay, WMRLS Regional Administrator, one of my co-panelists, asked a great question: "Is 'reference' the best name for what we do?" What is a better name?

Favorite Reference Sources?

This is an informal poll, for the LIS crowd.

If you were stranded on a desert isle, and you were lucky enough to continue doing reference for your current constituents, what 5 reference sources would you want to have on hand? You're lucky enough to have both high-speed Internet access as well as a safe, climate-controlled space for up to 5 reference works. :-)

Mine?

- Statistical Abstract of the United States.
- The Statesman’s Year Book.
- Dorling Kindersley Ultimate Visual Dictionary.
- MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (and its cousins, Turabian & the APA Style guide) not for favoriteness, necessarily, but definitely for usefulness.

And I reserve one player to be named later.

School Librarians Rock!

Dodie Gaudet posts over at the Our Future blog about the terrific-ness of school librarians and is filled with Respect and Admiration for them.

I totally agree! I teach reference to future school librarians (among others) and since I don't know much about the field, I am doing some reference observations of my own. I have already visited two school librarians and have at least one more visit lined up. They are awesome. So much energy in the schools, so many different kinds of questions, students, teachers, resources, etc. Incredible.

The librarian I visited on Friday let me see some of the assignments her students had to complete -- with her assistance. Here are some of the questions that I will work into future reference assignments:

1. A student from the local vocational technical high school comes to see you one afternoon at the public library. For a health class, she has to find information on a career she would like to investigate. She's thinking about being an EMT or an emergency room nurse. She doesn't have a computer at home, she says, and she doesn't use them much at school. How can you help her?

2. You are the high school librarian and a social studies teacher has asked her students write a 1-2 page paper on a country of their choice. The assignment handout says they have to cover the following areas: population, religions, weather, customs, currency, education, life expectancy, imports & exports, industries, brief history and a map. That's a lot! The students will be in the library for 3 days to study this; what resources would you make available?

3. You are helping student who has to complete four of 10 questions for a Bill of Rights project. He's working on this one and is sitting at the computer looking very perplexed. He needs to “Create a large timeline that illustrates at least 5 of the major Supreme Court cases and their relation to the 4th Amendment.” You can definitely help him - but how?

Phew -- there is a lot to learn. Go school librarians, go!

How Doctors Make Decisions

Interesting article in this week's The New Yorker about how doctors think / make decisions. What's the Trouble, a medical dispatch by Jerome Groopman is subtitled "How Doctors Think." I'd say it's also about how they make decisions, and specifically three kinds of thinking that lead to bad decisions on their part. Malcolm Gladwell covered this a bit in Blink : the power of thinking without thinking, but this is a personal essay on topic.

Groopman describes three kinds of thinking that adversely affect doctors' decision making, with three different anecdotes.
1. Representativeness errors -- you believe what you see and "fail to consider possibilities" that contradict your mental template. The opposite of Occam's razor?
2. Availability errors -- when you see six patients in a row with the flu, and the seventh presents with similar symptoms, you're more apt to diagnose the seventh with the flu too (kind of like word priming, I'd guess); first described by Tversky & Kahneman, in Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology in 1973. (wikipedia on availability)
3. Personal feelings for a patient -- The good Dr. Groopman admits to missing a diagnosis because he was reluctant to subject his "favorite patient on the ward" to an extensive (and buttocks) exam.

This is interesting for the medical profession, but it has (less dire) implications for librarians too -- I know I make assumptions at the reference desk which color the questions I ask. Sometimes I guess right, but not always, and then I have to backtrack, and occasionally start over.


Finally, Groopman refers to Achieving quality in clinical decision making: cognitive strategies and detection of bias, by Pat Croskerry, published in the 2002 Academic Emergency Medicine for more info.

One of My Favorite Reference Books

Ah, the Statistical Abstract of the United States. 2007 edition is out, and the Times has a story about it:
Who Americans Are and What They Do, in Census Data
By SAM ROBERTS
Published: December 15, 2006
"Americans drank more than 23 gallons of bottled water per person in 2004 — about 10 times as much as in 1980. We consumed more than twice as much high fructose corn syrup per person as in 1980 and remained the fattest inhabitants of the planet, although Mexicans, Australians, Greeks, New Zealanders and Britons are not too far behind."

Amazingly, this story interests lots o' people; right now, it sits atop of the Times' "Most Popular" stories list.

See what the GPO has to say about The Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2007 or check out the data itself, at census.gov.

"Hi, Pat, your question is interesting"

Carol Tenopir’s March 1 column in Library Journal describes research by Marie Radford Lynn Silipigni Connaway into the social dynamics of chat, particularly in the relationship between librarians & patrons.

“They find that chat reference conversations are full of interpersonal ‘relational facilitators‘ and ‘relational barriers.‘“

Facilitators include “providing information about oneself, offering reassurance, using humor and informal language, and demonstrating interest or approval“, while barriers can include the librarians’ nemesis “negative closure”, such as an abrupt end to the session with a robotic script.

Overall, Tenopir reports that “positive relational facilitators outnumber relational barriers in chat transcripts by a ratio of 9 to 1 for librarians and about 3.5 to 1 for patrons. When informal, nonverbal, unscripted, positive interactions are initiated by the librarian, chances for a positive interaction and positive response from the patron increase.“

Real Life Librarian Blogs

These two blogs are great for prospective reference librarians – they tell what reference library work is really like, as opposed to sources and formal reference theory which is what I teach at Simmons. Both have graciously allowed me to use their experiences in class, but if you want to know what it’s like for 2 different librarians, check out …

Feel-Good Librarian, who "works at the reference desk of a midwestern library" and
Vampire Librarian "Because those are the hours i keep and that's the job i have"

Linguistics & Reference Questions

Interesting article in the May 2005 issue of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology on linguistics & answering reference questions. Hampshire doesn't have access to the full-text online, but you can read the citation & abstract at the Wiley / JASIST home page. I was able to download the pdf without paying, so maybe it's free!

A linguistic analysis of question taxonomies.
Jeffrey Pomerantz Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. Volume 56, Issue 7, Pages 715 - 728.