Dave Harmeyer - The Reference Interview Today: Negotiating and Answering Questions Face to Face, on the Phone, and Virtually

The Reference Interview Today

Negotiating and Answering Questions Face to Face, on the Phone, and Virtually

Dave Harmeyer

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham Boulder New York Toronto Plymouth, UK

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Harmeyer, Dave, 1956

The reference interview today : negotiating and answering questions face to face, on the phone, and virtually / Dave Harmeyer.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8108-8815-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8108-8816-6 (ebook)

Reference services (Libraries) 2. Electronic reference services (Libraries) I. Title.

Z711.H419 2014

025.5'2dc23

2013037114

TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Sheli

Wife, mother, encourager, friend

Breanna Grace

1st miracle daughter

Sophia Janelle

2nd miracle daughter

In the early 1990s, I became acquainted with Dave Harmeyer. At the time, he was a graduate student in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (now the Department of Information Studies). During the course of his graduate studies, he wrote what I considered a publishable paper entitled Potential Collection Development Bias: Some Evidence on a Controversial Topic in California. We worked closely together on it until his graduation, at the end of the fall term 1993.

You can imagine my pleasure when he learned that College and Research Libraries would publish his manuscript in March of 1995 (56:10111). Placing a great deal of confidence in his scholarship, I asked him to serve as a guest lecturer in my DIS 245: Information Access classes (fall 2006). About the same time, he asked me to write a letter of recommendation for him when he applied to Pepperdine Universitys School of Education and Psychology; next, he asked me to serve on his EdD dissertation committee, and I did so willingly.

Given my reading of his dissertation, I believe that Dave has undertaken original work that sheds significant light on the nature of virtual/digital reference transactions. He has analyzed hundreds of reference transcriptions, which at the moment is a nearly unique achievement. As you may know, much of the scholarly history of reference transaction research has focused on the presumed difficulty of test questions, whereas Dave has actually looked at hundreds of real questions. His sociolinguistic analysis of these interviews should be quite enlightening for the profession.

Of course, he has been blogging as well (see The Reference Interview Today), and you will see that influence in the following pages. I love the idea of anything that will improve the quality of service rendered in our libraries, whether we are talking about checklists, flowcharts, or other systems analysis techniques. The point is that Dave has thirteen wonderful scenarios full of anecdotes, intuition, and evidence-based practices to help us out.

In short, as you read the collected chapters, I hope that you will agree that Dave Harmeyers The Reference Interview Today will make an important contribution to our field, specifically in our shared interest of improving reference librarianship.

Dr. John V. Richardson Jr.

UCLA Professor Emeritus of Information Studies

September 2013

The blog that augments this book at http://referenceinterview.word
press.com/ has a tagline that describes the common ground in both blog and book: Best Practices for the Reference Interview. So I was curious: What kind of competition is a best-practices book up against these days? According to the worlds largest online public catalog, WorldCat, 13,044 books have the phrase best practices in their titles or tables of contents. If you add the truncated term librar* as a subject heading, that whittles it down to 134 books. And if you replace librar* with reference as a subject heading, we now have 24 books published between 1993 and 2013. So, what compelling reasons make this book worth your time reading: things that those others have not already covered? Well, that depends on who you are...

If you are, as I was, a student in a credentialed or American Library Associationaccredited masters program in library and information science, this book is for you. I have heardand you may say it yourself somedayNo one ever effectively explained to me how to really conduct a successful reference interview. The thirteen scenarios here, set in both a public and an academic library, recall mostly real-life reference interview conversations informed by passionate intuition and, in some cases, evidence-based practices, as explained in chapter 16, A Conceptual Model for Online Chat Reference Answer Accuracy. Each scenario is more than merely anecdotal. Imbedded in the stories are timeless principles. You may ask, Are there really enduring principles for the reference interview that change little over time? Well, one example to consider is Ranganathans 1931 five laws of library science. Most of Ranganathans philosophical foundations of the modern library profession are imbedded in several of the reference interviews. There are thought-provoking questions at the end of each narrative, written within Blooms taxonomy of learning domains, which encourage you to begin with factual-type questions before leading you toward progressively higher levels of learning, such as analyzing and evaluating. Finally, each of the thirteen situations has a place in the blog for you to continue the discussion with others on the topic of best practices for the reference interview today.

I admit that it is not an easy task to suggest that you read this book. In addition to many well-written and useful field guides on the reference interview by specialists with decades of experience, you probably think that you do not need yet another primer on one of our most essential and sustainable professional tasks in the profession. All I can say is, you will miss out! You will miss out on a group of crazy, truthful stories written in the genre of British veterinary surgeon James Herriots All Creatures Great and Small. You will miss out on what the reference interview might look like in the year 2025. You will miss out on what Harry Potter and the Secrets of Hogwarts has to do with the reference interview. Finally, you will miss out on contributing toward improving the reference interview for the next generation of reference professionals built on a common narrative as found in the book and continued in the blog The Reference Interview Today.

This is just my bias... I think the thirteen stories stand on their own as entertaining ways to crack the door just a little on what it really is like to work as a professional reference librarian. They kill the stereotype of what a librarian does at the reference desk, on the phone, in chat, and in places such as Second Life and even the future. Those who read these scenarios will be stronger advocates for the profession and its changing, challenging, risky future. And in addition to inspiring future library and information professionals... who knows... if the right community learns about this work, these thirteen unassuming stories about a passionately committed reference professional at the beginning of the twenty-first century might grow into something akin to the television episodes of the endearing, rural, midtwentieth-century veterinarian James Herriot.