Reference interview: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 21:31, 18 April 2011

Revision as of 17:28, 12 May 2011

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1. Herbert White (1992) says that librarians need to emphasize their strengths. As computers increasingly take over clerical tasks that computers are good at, librarians should focus attention on aspects of service involving human communication that computers can't do well, Let computers get involved in document identification, document delivery, overdue notices, interlibrary loans and cataloguing, White argues, and let librarians take a proactive role in information intermediation, making the reference interview even more important.

2. In an unobtrusive study of reference service in Suffolk County public libraries on Long Island, Thomas Childers (1 9801978) instructed surrogate users to pose "escalator" questions, starting initially with a broad request so that librarians would have to use probes to discover the specific questions the users really wanted answered. No matter how general the initial question was, in 67 percent of the cases library staff members asked no questions to clarify what information was required. The result was that these staff members got to the last step-the real question only 20 percent of the time and hardly ever provided an accurate answer. By contrast, the third who did that did use probes to arrive at the specific question provided an accurate answer 62 percent of the time.<ref>{{cite book|last=Childers|first=T.|title=The Effectiveness of Information Service in Public Libraries: Suffolk County: Final Report.|year=1978|publisher=Drexel University, School of Library, and Information Science.|___location=Philadelphia, PA}}</ref>

3. Accuracy is highly prized by librarians, but it is not the only, or even the most important, element that users look for: Users want information packaged in a certain format; they want it within a