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Take Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia made up entirely of user-generated and user-edited content. On an afternoon this past spring, reference librarian Carson Holloway '75 sat at his desk, prepping for a research consultation with a graduate student who was working on a paper on Christian Zionism. Wikipedia was one of his first stops. He skimmed the entry for Christian Zionism and clicked on a few links at the bottom of the page.
Many professors and librarians were wary of Wikipedia early on—and, in fact, many continue to question its dependability. But while Holloway says he would never suggest that a student use the website as an authoritative source, he does believe that it is useful as a means for getting a broad overview of an unknown topic, and may lead a reader to other, more reputable sources.
He's not alone. At an American Library Association conference earlier this year, reference department head Ferguson and Aisha Harvey, another Duke reference librarian, revealed the results of a membership survey they'd conducted in October 2007 on the topic of Wikipedia use. Ninety-four percent of respondents said they had used Wikipedia to find information personally. Perhaps more telling, 74 percent said they had used the website as a resource in answering a patron's question, and 90 percent said that librarians "should" use Wikipedia.
Of course, librarians hope that sites like Wikipedia are just first stops for the students they assist. "As you progress as a researcher, you find that there is such a bounty of stuff that is not online," Ferguson says. "The library houses manuscripts, special collections, federal documents, all kinds of stuff that you won't find in a Google search.
"The percentage of stuff that is online is really small, but since there is so much current stuff, it skews people's perceptions."
Many argue that in a world where so much information is published online—some reliable, some not so reliable—reference librarians are even more important
as guides. Margaret Brill, Ferguson's predecessor as head of reference, says that she's
noticed that students in recent years are actually less familiar than their predecessors with academic resources like ProQuest or LexisNexis, not to mention those resources available offline. Students are increasingly tech-savvy, she says, "but
that's different than being skilled at doing library research."
The library subscribes to more than 400 databases, many of which have the potential to yield more specialized and more complete results than those available through general Web searches. Reference librarians continue to play an important role in developing the library's collection of databases, as well as other elements of its collections, both in print and online.
As classic reference guides have gone online, the library has kept up pace, says Brill, who still serves as subject librarian for Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Strolling through the reference stacks, she stops in front of long rows of shelves holding sixty volumes of the 2004 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Perkins now subscribes to the dictionary's digital version. Where students once had to come to the library and page through these volumes, searching alphabetically for multiple terms, the online service allows them to access the information from the comfort of their own dorm rooms. What's more, she says, entries now provide quick links to citations and related materials.
The ability of students to carry out
complex research projects from the comfort of dorms, reading rooms, and coffee shops presents new challenges to the librarians who would assist them. Those at Duke
and elsewhere describe periodic encounters with students who come to the desk frustrated after spending hours searching
fruitlessly for a bit of information that is,
to a trained librarian, easy to find.
"We need to be more aware now of the point at which the user stops being able to figure it out for themselves" and be there to help them make the next steps, says Jeffrey Pomerantz, an assistant professor in the information and library-sciences school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies the integration of digital reference services into libraries.
To that end, almost all university libraries now operate "virtual reference desks," where reference librarians are available for consultation via the Web. In the late 1990s, online chat and messaging programs became popular among students, who used them to stay in constant touch with friends at school and back home. By the early 2000s, librarians had begun to take notice. Ferguson recalls walking through the undergraduate library at UNC, where she was assisting librarians while working on her master's degree in library science. Every student seemed to have an AOL Instant Messenger (IM) window up in the corner of the screen.
In the summer of 2003, UNC's reference staff began taking questions via IM, and when Ferguson came to interview for a job as coordinator of virtual reference services at Duke the following year, she talked at length with Tom Wall, associate university librarian for public services, about the technology. After being hired, one of her first projects was to replace a chat subscription service that Duke had begun testing in 2002 with IM. The service has taken off. Librarians fielded 500 questions during the 2003-04 school year using the old chat service; this past year, they answered more than 5,000 on IM.
Last fall, they embedded a messaging window in their website so that users no longer have to log in to IM to send a message. The technology, Wall says, is "among our fastest-growing services." The instant service makes the response time of the desk's e-mail service, which guarantees an answer within two hours when librarians are on the desk, seem glacial by comparison.
Virtual reference is just one piece of the reference staff's communications strategy. A few years ago, the reference desk adopted a new slogan, "Save Time, Ask a Librarian," which was subsequently shortened to "Save Time, Ask Us" and in some cases, simply "Ask Us Now!" While on the desk or walking the floor, librarians wear blue and yellow buttons adorned with the slogan. It also features prominently on the library's website, where it serves as a link to a contact page that includes the desk's phone number and e-mail address, and an open IM window.
In addition, librarians have spent time improving subject-specific guides that are available on the library's website. In the past, Wall says, each guide "was just a litany of content. Now it's more of a portal." The pages integrate content with useful links, as well as an IM window. They also have directed this content to course-specific Blackboard sites. Wall estimates that about 25 percent of the sites, where professors host online discussions and post syllabuses, assignments, and readings, now also have customized reference guides for students conducting research.
Not all forays into new communications technology have been unqualified successes. The reference staff has struggled to find a way to use the popular social-networking website Facebook. The Perkins system is a registered "group," and many librarians have created personal pages. But besides an "application" that allows friends to search the Duke catalogue straight from librarians' personal pages, which most acknowledge is only mildly helpful, if at all, they haven't really found a way to make it useful. "We have to be part of the community, not there as interlopers," Wall says. They haven't figured out how to do that—yet.
They are also working on integrating software that will allow librarians to answer students' questions via cell-phone text message. "We need to give ourselves time to play around with these technologies," Ferguson says. "And we need to give ourselves permission to fail."
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