David A. Tyckoson - Reimagining Reference in the 21st Century

Reference, to be honest, has always been a problematic word for me. Lets be clear: Im fine with the concept. When I went to graduate school lo these eons ago, I fully intended to be a reference librarian, spending my professional life and career digging out hard-to-find answers to challenging questions for a grateful populace, trusty World Almanac, American Heritage Dictionary, and Encyclopaedia Britannica by my side, along with the more exotic sources like the Essay and General Literature Index and Famous First Facts. The one time I got to enter the sanctum sanctorum of a busy public library telephone answer service, and beheld the six-foot-tall lazy susan stacked with the tools of the trade, I could feel a thin trickle of drool forming in the corner of my mouth.

The word, though, the name of the service, always left me a bit cold. Yes, I know it denotes the ability we have to refer people to the right information or source, and yes, its been plastered on every service desk and millions of bookmarks for about a hundred years, but lets face it, that name (a) doesnt actually denote the nuanced, complex, and sophisticated nature of the work, and (b) means precisely zero to your average person.

However, we soldiered on, and when the Internet came to stay, many of us were faced with the once-in-a-lifetime challenge of translating this familiar service into that domain. Which we did, by using and adapting email, web forms, video, instant messaging, text, and chat, proving that everything old is new again, revisiting the discussions around providing reference service by mail correspondence, telephone, and even teletype each in their turn.

On the other hand, there are a number of larger principles, dare one say truisms, which have stayed constant or even deepened over the years:

Method over material. I stole this from Isadore Gilbert Mudge, perhaps one of the first academic reference librarians worthy of the name, who established much of what we think of as reference practice in her time at Columbia and in compiling early versions of the Guide to Reference Books. This phrase captures the importance and centrality of process, even and perhaps especially in the face of new, changing, and dying sources, and the fact that she coined this about a hundred years ago is pretty darned impressive.

Content over containers. I dont know if OCLC coined this in their 2003 report, but it rang a bell then and still does today. Simply put, lots of the time, people dont really give a fig what format information comes in; they just want it, which partially explains why streaming music and television are soundly thrashing discs (except vinyl, which is having its own renaissance) and, well, television. Pay attention to the what, and the how-represented will often follow.

Memory and imagination. Another blatant theft, this time from Eva Miller, a friend and former student, who used it in a keynote address once and rang another bell. Thats really what reference work is, isnt it? Remembering a source you know or suspect has the answer, and if not, imagining what one might look like. I dont know that theres a specialized dictionary of geological terms, but I can sure picture it.

The au courant question for the last few years for the faux-information-sophisticate set has been, What do we need a library for, when everythings on Google? We all have our private answers to that onepreferably delivered after counting backward from ten in Latin to avoid bloodshedbut in the context of reference, I can rattle off a bunch for you: We know multiple ways of searching; in fact, try to stop us. We know information and information sources, and which ones are trustworthy, authoritative, and worth the trouble. We can use Google in ways that will make your eyes spin. We know when to stop searching. I could go on. For the record, if somebody had demonstrated Google to any decent reference librarian twenty years ago, she would have fallen on her knees in awe and admiration and thought of a dozen ways her service could be improved using a magical tool like that. Living in the future has its advantages.

So here we are, yet again, wrestling with this concept, this service, this mindset, and this function that we treasure so much and that can have such a transformative effect on individuals and their communities. Still challenging, still changing, still a little fraught, and also well worth continually reinventing and reworking. Reference work helps. Its an essential part of libraries and librarianship, and lots of other places, too. It fits in the gaps, making information systems work, making them more human and humaneand beware anything calling itself a library that doesnt offer some kind of personal service component. Because it isnt.

There are some wonderful people and ideas represented in the rest of this volume, gathered so ably by my good friends Dave and John, and Im honored to have been asked to kick off the discussion here. Let me leave you with two final aphorisms: Yesterday and tomorrow. Im a particular fan of history, including the history of the library and the profession of librarianship. A lot has been learned over the decades, about information resources and how to evaluate them, about search technique and how to adapt it to changing tools and conditions, about information needs and how to pry them out of peoples heads, about information services and how to design them to best help a community, and about how all these pieces work together. Much of that is time- and situation-dependent and thus of little ongoing use, and theres also a lot thats well worth preserving, adapting, transforming, and moving forward, as good reference librarians always do.

Then, finally, the catchphrase that I cooked up with my dear students and colleagues at the Internet Public Library way back in 1995, when they were building from the ground up the first general-purpose, globally available, question-answering service and, incidentally, forging new plans and models of service provision. The more they worked and built and the more they compared what they were creating with what was then familiar at the time, the more it became clear that reference work in this new and still largely unknown environment was: Exactly the same and completely different.

So whatever we call it, and however and wherever its done and by whom, using whatever tools and resources, reference work goes on, because people have questions and need help, and thats what were here to do. What follows in the rest of this book should spur lots of discussions and ideas and deep thinking about whereand whatthat critical and pivotal service could and should be, going forward. All my best wishes to you all as you endeavor your way through what follows here and beyond.