Thoughts on the reference interview.

There is a lot of buzz around getting rid of the reference desk, and I think that the best I've read so far on the subject is an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (4/20/07) by Scott Carlson titled "Are Reference Desks Dying Out?"

Part of his discussion surrounds the fact that students are becoming more self-directed, which I see as a result of an increasing emphasis on instruction. Not a bad thing at all, really. The new types of "reference" he points towards are basically research consultation/instruction, in a number of settings. This is likely an extension of the whole everything 2.0 whatnot, which focuses on putting the user/patron/student in charge of their research.

Part of what has been getting to me about the reference interview, as it is presented in LIS textbooks by Katz, or Bopp/Smith is the fact that it has largely gone unexamined in light of the fact that more and more libraries and library users are becoming self-directed. Basic functions of the library are easy to figure out, and what people seem to need help with is in the area of instruction and research. First of all, naming the whole thing a "reference interview" is unhelpful, because the strategy of asking people what they need is as easily applied to determining what instruction would be helpful, not only for "reference" questions.

Secondly, no matter how hard we may try, our interviews will always color the search. End of story. Our knowledge of the subject and of it's attached sources will never match the searcher's, nor the person (teacher/professor/absent student) who designs any imposed queries. To cop some ideas from Peter Morris (author of Ambient Findability), a straight interview, conducted at a desk, lowers the findability of library resources, because the librarian is supposed to channel them and select the right one(s), which takes away from the uniqueness of the search, of the searcher's conceptions, and their results.

I think that a person's final product is very much a result of their searches for information, and too much coloring of the searches' results (I would also argue that we as librarians oversimplify complex searches to fit our sources as well) results in much less unique and personal research. There is an imperative by reference librarians to make our users conform to the tools at hand, and while this may raise the general quality of research being done, it also locks searches into preconceived notions of how information is organized, and detrimentally, how it is to be used.