Reference Evolution Preconference
Posted by: Rebecca Vnuk
At last month’s ALA Annual Conference in Washington, D. C. I attended the “Reference Evolution” preconference organized by the MARS and RSS sections of RUSA. (MARS, incidentally, is changing its name from Machine Assisted Reference Section to Emerging Technologies in Reference Section, which doesn’t fit the acronym but sounds much more modern.)
Joe Janes of the University of Washington was the keynote speaker. He talked about the movement away from fixed media to downloads to streaming to clouds, with each step having a profound effect on our practice. At every step access becomes less of a point. Access is no longer the problem or the solution, and access can no longer be what libraries are about.
Joe also outlined the trends he thinks reference needs to follow: faster, smaller (think mobile apps), denser, freer, easier, more ubiquitous and available, and more social.
I especially liked what he called our “secret weapons,” or competitive advantages:
- The reference interview, especially in domains like chat, e-mail and texting.
- Print (surprisingly). People associate us with it and we have a lot of it.
- Our knowledge of stuff.
- Areas where we can shine, like readers’ advisory and research support.
- Search. We know “how to make a search system sit up and beg.”
Finally, Joe reminded the audience that stuff (formats, genres, publishers, etc.) come and go, and our focus should be on what Isadore Mudge, considered the founder of reference librarianship, referred to as ”method over material.”
You can find Joe’s slides here.
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