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At a symposium hosted last year by Columbia University's library system, Steven Bell, a librarian from Temple University, took a controversial stand.
In a public debate before an audience made up almost entirely of reference librarians, Bell argued for the abolition of the reference desk by the year 2012.
His position wasn't as radical as it might sound. He wasn't advocating that his listeners retire or find new jobs. To the contrary, he said he believes that their services are more important than ever. But with the Internet changing not only the ways that people—students, scholars, and even librarians—conduct research, but also how they communicate, he believes the old model of a desk staffed by highly trained reference librarians is well on its way to becoming outdated, perhaps even extinct.
In its place, he and others envision a world, not so far off, where librarians are available 24/7 to apply their finely honed research skills and knowledge of information systems to helping patrons search the vast digital stacks of the Internet, as well as the brittle pages of old newspapers and musty shelves stocked with incunabula.
Bell's salvo at Columbia was just the latest round in a larger debate that has occupied the reference world for at least the last decade. With the explosion of the Internet and its host of search options in the '90s, some experts predicted that librarians would become obsolete. Bell is anything but a doomsayer, but in his talk at Columbia and in a blog on the Association of Colleges and Research Libraries' site, he is continually pushing his colleagues to adapt.
"Methods and modes of providing reference service will continue to change—and must, if we are to stay relevant to our users," he wrote in a blog entry not long after the symposium.
That the world of library reference is quickly morphing has long been clear. And the debate about librarians' role is one that resonates among the field's practitioners every day. It is discussed at conferences, written about in library journals, and batted about by an active community of bloggers.
The uncertainty about the future may be unsettling to some, but the potential for technology to change the library world is also clearly invigorating to most in the field. "Any librarian who was afraid of technological change would have left the profession twenty years ago," says Phoebe Acheson, until recently a senior library assistant on the Perkins Library's reference staff. "It's not an age or generational thing. It's a mindset."
The mission of reference librarians is simple to state, complex to fulfill: Keep the library's reference materials well-stocked and organized, and help patrons navigate those resources.
In some cases, librarians are asked to locate elusive answers to basic factual questions, but more often, they are engaged by in-depth queries for which they provide a battery of support. Through a process known as the "reference interview," they pose questions to help students focus research topics—narrowing those that are too broad, and broadening those that are too narrow. They help steer students toward the most effective way of using the library's reference materials, making suggestions about books, databases, and other resources. And they instruct students on how to properly cite reference materials.
In the days before computers, almost all reference queries were made in person, and a search of the library's materials required a skilled librarian to navigate through stacks of hard-bound indexes, which would in turn point to reference books and journal articles kept in library files or on microfilm.
With the advent of computers, printed indexes gave way to digitized databases. But for most patrons in the 1980s and early 1990s, librarians still served as essential guides for many seeking answers to questions large and small.
Now, the growth of the Internet has changed the way that information is stored and organized and, perhaps most important in this context, sought in our culture. With new websites popping up all the time, information that was once buried in books is now readily available. Not only that, the existence of powerful search engines like Google makes that information easier than ever to find. Before the Internet, "librarians had total control over search tools," says Jean Ferguson, head of the Perkins Library System's reference department. "They decided which terms to apply and how to apply them."
Google simplified things. In combination with other sites, it has proven especially adept at providing answers to the basic factual or statistical questions commonly known as "ready-reference."
"Say the question is, 'Where did John Edwards graduate from college?' Now any twelve-year-old can find the answer on the Internet," says Acheson. This shift was, at least at first, troubling to some, who, monitoring the Association of Research Libraries' annual statistics, noted that the total number of reference queries fielded by reference librarians at member libraries had dropped sharply since the early 1990s.
Others question what those numbers actually mean, whether a dip in total questions is necessarily a sign of trouble, or whether it might instead be seen as a boon. If reference librarians spend less time skimming reference books for biographical details about recent presidential candidates, in theory this gives them more time to devote to guiding students through in-depth questions and developing general reference materials.
Of course, students are not just using Google to find basic facts. "It is no exaggeration to say that most student research projects begin with a Google search," observed W. Lee Hisle, a Connecticut College librarian, in a 2005 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
That trend has only increased in recent years. In 2004, Google expanded its empire with Google Books, which features a growing menu of free digital books; the following year it introduced Google Scholar, a searchable archive of full-text scholarly articles that is similar to, if less comprehensive than, many of the private databases that research libraries subscribe to for student use.
With the rapid advance of information technology, it's not hard to see why some popular accounts have cast librarians as Luddites facing a dire threat posed by the Internet and all of its glorious resources. But this narrative is, at best, incomplete.
While there are surely some old-school librarians out there tucked in a corner conscientiously flipping through dusty volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, most reference librarians, especially those at major research institutions like Duke, are far from technophobes. Many of their own databases migrated online long ago. These librarians, human search engines, really, see technology as a tool, rather than a threat. They are early adapters, quick to experiment with new technologies—even those that others in academe view as the enemy—and integrate them into the job.
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