Last week I attended two conferences, Reference Renaissance in Denver and the joint Pacific Northwest Library Association and Washington Library Association conference in Victoria, British Columbia. It is unusual to attend conferences back to back, but I was speaking at both (at five separate sessions, plus I helped moderate 16 short talks), and it turned out that the two events had a lot of complimentary and contradictory things to say.
One major theme was disintermediation and reintermediation. Author Robert Sawyer, the keynote speaker for the PNLA/WLA conference compared Star Trek's Mr. Spock to Google. Spock's station on the bridge of the USS Enterprise was the "Library Computer", a vast store of knowledge he could quickly access. What science fiction failed to predict was that everyone can use the library computer these days and that Google would take on Spock's role as information gatekeeper. This is usually referred to as "disintermediation", and unspoken here is the idea that reference librarians are obsolete and we've got to find a better role for the library.
So says Robert Sawyer, and he adds, "there will always be more information in the cloud than in the library". But how good is it? He didn't say, but he did seem more worried about "Peak Oil" than about the struggling publishing industry. He wants libraries to print electronic documents on acid-free paper and place them on mountaintops so that when all the icecaps melt and all the oil is gone, our cultural and intellectual heritage will be preserved. He also suggests hand-crank-operated flashlights.
Andrew Walsh was the keynote speaker at Reference Renaissance and he had a slightly different take on libraries. Walsh discussed "QR codes" - two-dimensional barcodes that look like the snowy patterns on your tv screen when you turn to a channel that doesn't broadcast. A "smartphone" user can download a free reader "app" to their phone, and then when they see one of these codes, they can point their phone's camera at it, and the reader will translate the code into some instructions, such as taking the phone's web browser to a website, displaying a message, dialing a phone number or anything else that a phone might know how to do.
Walsh urged libraries to use QR codes to provide help to users in places and situations where a staff member isn't always available. A QR code on the photocopier could link to a video that gave instructions on how to use it. More creatively on the reference side, a QR code on a book might link to a list of read-a-likes, or the catalog record for the book in a series.
Walsh echoed a column by Meredith Farkas in a recent issue of American Libraries magazine ("Guided by Barcodes", http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/columns/practice/guided-barcodes) - right now, few people have the tools to read these things (patrons need the right kind of phone and need to have downloaded something), but eventually everyone will, so libraries should adopt the technology now. I'm not convinced that this is true - it is a mighty specific bit of technological determinism - but agree this an interesting area for libraries to explore and certainly it raises questions we should be thinking about.
For example, if we are going to provide better instructions for using photocopiers, what is wrong with creating excellent signs that you don't need a phone to read? If we are going to put links from books to similar books, why not take a belt-and-suspenders approach? The QR code provides a shortcut for the people with a specific tool, but a link to a library webpage could be placed on the same label.
Also at Reference Renaissance, Stephanie Alexander and Jennie Gerke of the University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries talked about designing and implementing interactive kiosks ("Being everywhere at once") to put in parts of the library that didn't have staff nearby. Instead of giving patrons one specific type of help that we think they will need, the kiosks allow patrons to explore several options near that physical location, as well as access online library resources and to chat live with a librarian if they need more help.
Which makes me think that the advantage that QR codes have is that they are easy to reproduce on a large scale, making them much more interesting for linking patrons to read-a-likes than for unjamming photocopiers. I'm sorry I didn't think of it while I had the chance to enjoin a representative from Ingram, but I wonder if library vendors would be willing to do some of the heavy lifting for us - we create the lists, they print the labels to put on the books and slap 'em on.
But the broader questions are, if we can't be everywhere at once, how do we serve patrons and what is the best use of our time? A lot of libraries have been exploring "roving reference".
At Reference Renaissance, Sara Davidson of the University of California at Merced gave a short Pecha Kucha talk about how they used student workers at their library for roving reference ("Rolling Out Roving Reference"). The idea was that most student queries could be answered by other students, but another thing to know about UC Merced is that they are a new campus and their library has never had a reference desk. They saddled students with bright red t-shirts with the letter "i" on the back and sent them roving around to help other patrons in the library. Students had two hour roving shifts but were also given time afterwards to reflect on their shift, make notes about it and talk about it with professional librarians. Davidson reported that students answered 2.7 questions per hour. 50% of them took less than 1 minute, and another 30% were less than 5 minutes. That sounds like a lot of roving and not a lot of reference, and in fact, many questions had to do with printing. They also found that their patrons didn't necessarily understand why these people were wandering around offering help. Ultimately, the library decided that the number and type of questions being answered did not justify putting librarians on desk shifts. I don't see how the one follows from the other if the premise was that students could do the work.
Davidson also sketched out a helpful process for any reference (or library public services) project, which I parroted at a panel on reference at the PNLA/WLA conference:
1 - start small
2 - know how you will evaluate the program
3 - market your service so patrons know what you are doing
Also on the panel with me was Toby Thomas from the Seattle Public Library. Thomas coordinates their virtual reference service and also does all manner of reference at the downtown branch, which doesn't have a reference desk, or any public service point, on every one of their floors. When the building opened a few years ago, staff carried radio badges from Vocera to summon one another to where patrons need help, but they eventually they fell out of favor. I've seen this system in place in hospitals and it works well for nurses to communicate with each other in short bursts - "are you busy", "can you bring more tissues to room 810", "we need meds in room 12", and I can see how it could be more complicated in a reference environment. At SPL, staff now use walkie-talkies for security and emergency purposes, but not to call one another to different spots in the building. Since the library is full of people using wireless internet, it is common for patrons to complain about disturbances or notify staff about security issues from patrons connecting to their online chat service. There is still a main reference desk at the "mixing chamber" on the fifth floor and it is usually so busy, in part due to tourism, that roving reference is currently not a possibility.
I contrast this with the Central Library here at Multnomah County Library. We have something like 14 service points and most of them are not usually busy. It is the best use of staff time? Is it the best way to meet patrons' needs? Are those actually the same thing? I think these are questions MCL staff should be discussing.
Robert Sawyer pressed the idea that libraries need to act as places for communities to gather and interact. If we can't be information gatekeepers - if there are better ways - we should be orienting our spaces to the community's needs.
I saw a good example of this at Reference Renaissance. Jennifer Church-Duran, Fran Devlin and Erin Ellis of the University of Kansas - Lawrence talked about redesigning their library so that it acknowledged that the academic process did not separate research from writing ("Off the Desk: Integrated Service Models in the Learning Commons). Students writing papers and working on projects are constantly researching, so the library invited the campus writing center to use their space. They are also providing more collaborative spaces like study rooms with giant screens for students to connect multiple laptops to.
I think these ideas are instantly applicable to public libraries. If we have wi-fi, and if Starbucks has wi-fi, the way to "stay relevant" isn't to add a coffee shop, but to provide more and better possibilities for patrons using our spaces.
At Reference Renaissance's plenary session, Douglas County Library Director Jamie Larue pointed out that we are pulled in different directions. Libraries can provide this great connection - or place to connect - for our community members, but we are also serving a lot of people who place their holds online, and spend no time in the building except to pick them up and check them at the self-serve stations. Of course, at MCL, the huge demand for materials makes us want to encourage that kind of behavior because we ain't gettin' more staff.
Which brings me back to the question of what is the best use of our time. Two of my presentations at Reference Renaissance focused on the problem of how to serve more patrons with L-net, our statewide chat and e-mail reference service.
In one, I talked about comparing chat sessions where librarians worked with one patron with ones where they juggled multiple patrons. In another, I discussed L-net's Conversation Archive, which is a public (with patrons' permission) database of chat transcripts. Neither one turned out to be especially promising as a strategy for reaching more people, and I expect we ain't gettin' more staff either.
All of which reminds me that MCL's priorities are serving children, non-native english speakers, people in financial hard times and providing civic engagement and excellent customer service. So instead of trying to serve everyone, we can target our services to meeting these needs.
An excellent application of this idea was presented by Jill Robinson Morris of NCLIVE at the Reference Renaissance conference, "NC LIVE, Working for North Carolina: A Statewide Awareness Campaign Supporting Economic Development and Quality of Life Through NC Libraries" It was my favorite presentation all week. NCLIVE is North Carolina's statewide database and library resource program, only libraries pay for membership. They worked with their libraries and the North Carolina State Library to focus their resources on addressing the economic downturn.
They identified the resources they had - such as databases like Business Source Premiere – and the patrons they might be able to help with them, like job seekers, people looking to go back to school, and small business owners. Then they redesigned their website to make it easier to use, and made it task-based (find a job, learn a skill, apply for benefits). Then they created a marketing campaign to reach their audience.
I like that they were able to use some of their resources to make their services better for everyone (like making their website better) and also focus them on addressing a particular problem, without those two things conflicting. I also appreciated that the speaker demonstrated how the marketing approach could be useful in achieving this.
I thought that both of these conferences were worth going to. The PNLA/WLA conference was smaller and I think better organized (caveat: I was on the planning committee of the other one). The Reference Renaissance conference was weighted heavily towards academic libraries but there was still a lot to learn. That conference may or may not be back in a few years, and I hope my library will continue to send people if the opportunity arises.
