I very rarely use the reference desk, in fact, I don’t think I used it once in all of undergrad, and I use the one in my department’s own library, the Inforum (”The integrated library and information studies laboratory”), exclusively. Part of the reason why I like doing this degree is because research is the best part of writing for me, particularly when I cannot find what I want. So I have never really had an information need which I wasn’t eager to solve on my own.

We were told to construct a reference question which we truly were interested in and honestly didn’t know they answer to, so we could judge our level of service. For privacy reasons I will not disclose the question, lest it be tied to me.

However, did I ever get bad service. The extent of my aid was two keyword searches, one in the catalogue (the university was not my own) and one in a subject-specific database. Each had a few hits, none of them really relevant. Now, I have heard about the reference interview, but we study it in a few weeks so I don’t know the mechanics of it. But I am sure that asking no probing questions about my topic is not one of the steps. After that, I was directed to contact someone else (the subject librarian).

I have two problems with this. The first is that it seems like no effort was really made, beyond what I could have done myself, typed “keyword1 AND keyword2″ in a search engine, if I was a neophyte library user. Because no questions were asked, the librarian did not even know until halfway through the search that I was looking for something in a different discipline then they had in mind.

The second problem was that I wished I was conducting the search for someone else, because I would have been much more interested in finding a solution! The thought of doing if for someone excites me. Furthermore, in the end the librarian gave up because they felt it was outside their own area: I am coming to realize more from the reading of these old library writers like Ranganathan and Bliss that the librarian has to be somewhat of a generalist. I think I consider myself a generalist, or at least I like to know a little about everything, and maybe the library is one of the only places left for us?

When talking about information needs and library anxiety, I never really understood what the big deal about it was. Having gone through that 25 minute experience of unhelpfulness I can truly see why people find it so difficult, and why some would be frustrated.

I also have a drive to make that situation better in my own professional life all of a sudden.

My professor is Clare Beghtol who I actually enjoyed in Bibliographic Control. I will discuss this more later, but right now I am preparing a presentation about the first edition of Bliss Bibliographic Classification (BC1), plus a 12-15 page paper to follow a week later. The class is dealing with all the major systems, including Colon Classification, and later thesauri, folksonomies and classification on the web. And it is not dumbed down but totally theoretical. Later I have a 30 page research paper.

I need a good day to digest Bliss’ two books, The Organization of Knowledge and the System of the Sciences and The Organization of Knowledge in Libraries before I write about him. However, as well I have to go through all four volumes of BC1 and critique the system, including its tables and index.

Sounds dry, but you don’t know how excited I am.

Dear Werke:

I am sorry I had to take you from the shelves, in all 12 volumes of beautiful cracking covers and yellowing paper. Apparently your lack of barcode signaled that no one had checked you out in almost 20 years. I am not a rare book expert, but I am pretty sure, given the death of Schiller in 1805, you are a first or second edition.

To the rest of you, some of you are even older than the Schiller and some of you are relatively new scholarly works that have obviously not been opened once since you were purchased. Some of you were donations in memory, ex libris Professor Long-Since-Passed-Away.

Most likely none of you will ever be read again.*

Sincerely,

Steven

• Quoting Steven’s new supervisor in charge of the logistics of moving things to the up-town storage facility: “If we do our jobs correctly, hopefully no more than 3% of all these works will ever be requested again.”

Long the subject of warnings that the Internet would spell their demise, public libraries are booming through new branches, more resources and more computers.

The article notes how libraries are expanding to be become public spaces which just happen to hold books. I didn’t know this, but there are branches of the Toronto Public Library which have hosted concerts, much to my shock (although the OPAC still sucks). Branches are being built all over the country, apparently, with the new Grande Bibliothèque in Montreal hosting double the number of patrons expected, 8,000 daily.

And, if that wasn’t enough, it just isn’t all computers, coffee shops and video games in the library. Circulation has gone up:

While there are no national statistics, the canadian Urban Libraries Council, which represents public libraries in cities with more than 100,000 people, says circulation increased more than 25 per cent between 1996 and 2005; visits went up by more than 20 per cent in the same period.

The article attributes the increase to the more “service-oriented culture” (i.e. no “ssssh”-ing). Whatever it is, this is great to hear. Finally professionals are getting the message and it is working for both librarians and users. The article concludes:

Many librarians argue that instead of weakening libraries, the Internet has magnified the need for accurate, reliable information, and in, in some cases, the service of trained professionals…[Says CLA Pres. Prof. Schrader:] “I believe that there will always be a very important role–and more important than people really recognize–for librarians to play in helping people find information.”

I seem to remember my Bibliographic Control professor mentioning the name of one US institution which attempted to stop cataloging but lived to regret it, but the name has slipped my mind. Does anyone else know of any examples of academic libraries which halted their cataloging and ultimately switched back?

Which brings me to the topic of a good book I am reading, Spanning the Theory-Practice Divide in Library & Information Science by Bill Crowley. I’ve only got through the first chapter, but this is a question I’ve been thinking about for a while. He outlines the three historical conceptions of whatever it is that I am studying here, “library studies”, “library and information science” and “information studies.”

I find myself unsure of this divide myself, and it seems that often on different days I feel like I am engaged in different things. Somedays I feel like am highly engaged with learning about being a service professional, other days I feel like I all could do forever is learn about the science-like mechanics of the profession, like classification schemes, the nature of citation indexes and general other Ranganathan- and Garfield-like subjects.

Yet often I feel like, particularly given the Internet and the information economy, I have to look at information in all its contexts, social, political, cultural, technological etc, and I feel more like the actual name of my degree, one who studies information.

Furthermore, I think that my department itself has some of this multiple personality disorder. As noted above, the name of the faculty is “Information Studies,” we are explicitly an “I-School,” and our dean is a philosopher/cognitive scientist who is teaching a course on the philosophy of information. At the same time the vast majority of my classes are not so academic in nature, straddling the divide between “library professional” and “library science” topics.

I feel disoriented here, and not because I am not doing well, on the contrary I am doing exceptionally well. The problem is that I have all these paths in front of me and I feel like I really can’t choose. Nor can I even decide if there even has to be a choice, or will some kind of conglomeration work itself out in the end.

I know for sure that what I came here to study I am no longer really interested in or I am not interested in the ways I thought I was going to be. Where to go from here is the next big question.