2007 Collaborative Virtual Reference Symposium

Registration is now open for the 2007 Collaborative Reference Symposium, which will be held in Denver on July 31 and August 1 this year. I hope it gets blogged well by attendees, as I'll be unable to attend.

Talking to IT about IM

Sarah Houghton-Jan has a nice post today detailing how to have a conversation with IT staff that may be resisting the use of IM software in the library.

It's ok to refer digital reference patrons to print materials...really

In our cooperative chat reference service, I have noticed that some librarians rarely point students to print resources when those resources may in fact be the best (and sometimes only) source of information for the topic in question. In one example, a student logged in repeatedly asking for help on the same question, and no one thought to recommend what is pretty much a standard reference source that would have quickly answered the question.

There are a lot of reasons why a librarian in chat or IM might rush to recommend an online source:

• The librarian assumes that the patron isn't on campus (or even in the library) and thus has no interest in print resources. This assumption is not often accurate. In our chat service, we find that at 40% of all chat sessions originate from computers here on campus.
• Fearing impatience (often, rightly so) from the patron, the librarian takes a satisficing approach to the patron's information need and rushes to show the student something that is maybe, just maybe, good enough to placate the patron for the moment. It may be that some librarians then intend to recommend to print sources, as they feel they have earned the trust of the patron; some do go on and suggest specific sources or suggest a search strategy in the catalog, but many never do.
  
• The librarian mistakenly assumes that since the patron is online, ergo the patron only will accept online sources.

Although I am beginning to scale back on my acquisitions here at the library in Baruch for print reference sources, I still feel that librarians in digital reference must advocate on behalf of the richness of their print collections whenever appropriate. If we don't speak up for print collections and remind users of them, who will?

Will there still be a desk?

Librarians have been busy this year debating the future of reference. First, a discussion arose at the ALA Midwinter meeting in January about whether libraries should still have a reference desk. Dave Tyckoson, the current president of RUSA, then posed the same question on RUSA's official blog on February 2 ("Ditching the Desk?") and got a few comments, including one that I wrote.

This same debate over the future of the desk came up again at the Reference Symposium held at Columbia University Libraries on March 9 at which it was argued whether or not the reference desk will disappear in five years. At ACRLog, Steven Bell wrote two posts describing his role in the debate in arguing that the desk would indeed be gone:

• "So What If We Do Pander To Students" (March 23)
• "Debating the Future of the Reference Desk" (March 26)

Another event that sparked a lot of commentary (on blogs and elsewhere) was a panel session on March 30 at the ACRL conference in Baltimore titled "The Reference Question--Where has Reference Been? Where is Reference Going?" Notable coverage included:

• Brian Matthews at the Ubiquitous Librarian: "Reference Desk Backlash" (April 16)
• Barbara Fister at ACRLog: "Re: Reference" (April 17)
• Kathy De Mey at the Dig_Ref list: "is face-to-face reference dying?" (April 18)
• Scott Carlson at the Chronicle of Higher Education: "Are Reference Desks Dying Out" (April 20)

Though dated April 20, the piece in the Chronicle of Higher Ed by Scott Carlson actually came out before the blog posts by Brian Matthews and Barbara Fister and is no longer freely available on the Chronicle's web site.

The blog posts all offer a rich set of comments that gave me quite a few ideas, not so much prognostications about the future but instead a vision of how I would like to see our college library's reference desk changed. In my next post, I'll tackle that.

Cormac McCarthy deserves his Pulitzer

The same day I finish reading Cormac McCarthy's latest novel, The Road, just happened to be the same day that it was announced he'd won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction this year. I read the book in two days and was very moved by it. As the father of two young boys, I was struck deeply by the book's theme of how a father deals with the reality of eventually leaving his child alone in a world that he is worried about (terrified even).

Claiming your work in the online world

Last summer, I set up a ClaimID account but didn't do much with it. Prompted by Bill Drew's post on the Library 2.0 forum on his experiments with it, I decided to revisit my account and update it a bit. Coming up with categories to differentiate the many kinds of works of mine that are online proved a bit tricky. To distinguish between blogs and wikis that are authored by a group, I came up with "group blogs" and "group wikis;" for blogs and wikis that entirely my own, I settled on "solo blogs" and "solo wikis." There's more for me to add, but I see that this effort is turning into something of an online CV for me.

ClaimID suggests that you can use your ClaimID URL to logon to sites that allow for OpenID logon. I just did so to log in to my Ma.gnolia account, which has been dormant since February 2006 (I've been more committed to del.icio.us over the years). You can see a screencast about how OpenID works on the Read/WriteWeb site.

It's not clear to me if there's going to be a critical mass of web sites that adopt OpenID sign on, although some folks see that on the horizon. I'm a bit worried about security issues of having a single sign-on for all places where I have accounts. Although it is a pain to manage all of those user names and passwords, there is some security in having lots of different ones; if one is compromised, that doesn't compromise all the others. If my ClaimID user name/password is discovered, though, that would give someone access to all of my other accounts that allow for OpenID login, a rather frightening scenario.

Video IM at Ohio University

Char Booth at Ohio University talks about an interesting pilot using Skype for a video IM reference service. Hear an interview with her (MP3) from the ACRL conference at the PALINET web site and read more about the service here.

FYI, interviews with other presenters from the Cyber Zed Shed program at this year's ACRL conference can be found online on the PALINET site.

libSite for more than just library web sites

Now that I've gotten past the breathless excitement part of seeing libSite launch, I can now see that my post yesterday about it may have mistakenly given the impression that libSite's goal is to provide a forum for users to submit reviews of just library web sites. It does have such reviews, but I now realize that libSite allows you to profile any web site related to libraries and librarianship.

For me, the profiles of library sites are my main reason to subscribe to the libSite feed. I just posted my own review of the University of Toronto Libraries site. I look forward to reading reviews by others.

New site for showcasing library web site design

I'm excited by a new site launched today called libSite where you can read reviews of library web sites as well as write your own. A former colleague of mine here in the library at Baruch College, Leo Klein, set up this little gem of a site that will likely to prove to be a key destination for anyone interested in web design and libraries. Leo, by the way, is also behind the not-so-new-anymore blog, ChicagoLibrarian.

When I came to the library at Baruch College in 1999 as a library school intern, I quickly realized what a talented designer Leo was. Although our library has redesigned its web site since Leo left, you can still see portions of his work that we left untouched that demonstrate his considerable elan as a designer, such as:

• An American Family: The Beecher Tradition
• Red Scare (1918-1921)

I don't pretend to have much in the way of web design skills, but I do appreciate all that Leo taught me before he left Baruch a few years ago. As our library's Web Oversight Committee soldiered on without him in the process of redesigning our web site, I began to gather a number of links that I shared with other members of the committee to illustrate a number of design innovations. You can see those links on our committee's del.icio.us account. Leo's new project, libSite, now offers a better forum for discussing the latest and best in web design and development in libraryland, one that I wish was around when my colleagues and I were checking out what other library's where up to.

FYI: In addition to Leo, some other librarian bloggers who consistently write about web design and are worth keeping up with include:

• Karen Coombs at Library Web Chic
• Bill Drew at Baby Boomer Librarian
• Elyssa Kroski at InfoTangle

UPDATE (April 12, 2007) A few more librarian bloggers who often write about design that I should have mentioned when I first posted this message:

• Nicole Engard at What I Learned Today...
• Sara Houghton-Jan at Librarian in Black
• David Lee King at David Lee King