Academic Librarian

My official title is “General & Humanities Reference Librarian,” but I don’t use it much. Partly it’s because a goodly portion of my job is collection development, but that’s not the only reason. It’s a good title as these things go, and nothing to be ashamed of, but when I think “reference librarian,” one thing comes first to mind. Reference librarians sit at desks in rooms full of reference books and wait for questions. Sure, they do more, but they still do this. Whether this is a good thing depends upon your library, and I can’t say how much your library might be like mine. But as long as that’s part of being a reference librarian, then “reference librarian” seems outdated for a lot of librarians.

Sitting at Desks

Reference librarians sit at desks in rooms full of reference books and wait for questions. Librarians have been arguing about the desk for years, but the reference desk still seems to figure prominently in libraries. I don’t know of any offhand that have gotten rid of theirs, and only a few places practicing the Brandeis model, though you probably know of more. On my last reference shift, I cleared a printer jam and refilled a stapler. The closest thing to a reference question I got was a visiting scholar asking me to look up an old communist newspaper in the catalog (which he’d already done, and which he knew we didn’t have). I then listened politely while he loudly told me how amazed and stunned he was that we didn’t have this on microfilm. No, perhaps the closest thing to a reference question was his follow-up question: WHY don’t you have this on microfilm? That’s one that with a little research and speculation I could probably answer. However, because of my knowledge of the reference interview, I know that’s not really the question he wanted answered. Is that an atypical desk shift? For some librarians it doesn’t matter. We sit and sit and sit and sit, and that’s what makes a reference librarian.

In Rooms Full of Reference Books

Reference librarians sit at desks in rooms full of reference books and wait for questions. Reference books seem to show no sign of diminishing in volume. There are specialized thises and concise thats on just about every topic under the sun. Some of these reference books are quite good, or at least I assume they are, because I couldn’t tell you the last time I consulted a reference book other than a foreign language dictionary. The only reference book anyone has asked me for recently is the Liddell-Scott lexicon. I do sometimes consult reference works, but typically only the large online sets. Smaller works are often most useful for answering quick factual questions, but I don’t get any quick factual questions, because everyone asking those just goes to Google or the Wikipedia. The background information and clarification of terms I need usually comes from just a handful of large online reference titles, and sometimes just from the Wikipedia for those subjects that traditional reference sources don’t handle well. (Whether contemporary British Islamic rap music is haram is a recent question that springs to mind. Is there a reference work with an entry on Fun-Da-Mental?) Some of my colleagues consult the books more often. One of my colleagues has been working in our reference room since I was three, and she’ll turn to the books and find great information. The question isn’t the usefulness of reference books, but whether the same information isn’t found more easily elsewhere. After a few years, not turning to reference books first became rarely turning to reference books at all.

I’m looking through my old reference textbook for all the kinds of books I don’t go to anymore. Directories? Never in print, almost never online. Almanacs? Typically only for historical questions. Atlases? Occasionally. Bibliographies? Years ago, I know librarians would write subject bibliographies. They might still write them, but I wouldn’t know because I never go to them. I used to try, but they were always dated. I’d find the perfect bibliography on some obscure subject only to realize it was written in 1974. So much of the information available only in reference books is now online for free or fee, and yet the reference books keep coming, and we keep buying them. Maybe that’s a good thing, but it seems like a fruitless attempt to control information by methods designed for a time when there was a lot less information to control.

Waiting for Questions

Reference librarians sit at desks in rooms full of reference books and wait for questions. I like to answer reference questions. I just rarely get any, at the desk. I’d be happy to get rid of the desk and hire a student to fill the staplers and search titles in the catalog. Sitting at a reference desk waiting patiently for the questions that never come—the questions using even a small portion of my research expertise—is a waste of my time.

What about the students? Don’t they need help? Yes, they do. I meet with a lot of students and answer a lot of emails from students, but they don’t come to the desk. They come to me because of my own outreach or instruction efforts, and that’s the case with much of the reference and research help done here. Students in the philosophy and religion departments know who I am and that they can come visit me because I go meet them all every year. The freshman writing seminars all have librarians assigned to them whose purpose is to help the students when they need help. So in any given semester, dozens of students of all years know they can contact me if they need library help, so they contact me directly. I much prefer this to the desk, because it gives them more personal and directed help. It also helps explain why they students don’t come to the desk as often. I help them get started or go farther on research essays; I help them find books and articles and other relevant material; I help them formulate research questions and get relevant background information. And I can help the advanced students more in arranged consultations in my office because I can prepare and learn something about the topics in advance. This is better for both of us than me trying to do it on the fly.

There are plenty of other options besides the desk, or even besides the outreach that I prefer. We also have a research consultation service. We have email reference. Oh, and there’s a page listing subject specialists people can contact directly. And all the databases-by-subject pages and research guides have names and contact information on them. And we have chat reference for those needing a quick answer. With all of the outreach, instruction, and easily available consultation, the reference desk fades in importance. I’d like to see it fade more, because I think there are better, more personal, and more efficient ways to provide research help.

But what about the small handful of people who wander up to the desk occasionally and expect a professional librarian to be sitting there ready to answer any complex question that they may have? What about that? I’ve heard that objection before, though not couched in quite those terms. The question is usually put more mildly, but that is the assumption behind the question. What about when someone has an immediate information need that can only be solved by a librarian? First, what are the chances that any given librarian sitting at a desk can solve every complex information problem? Low, I’d bet. Second, there are still librarians in the building. We can find one. Third, let’s check the stats. How often does this occur? Is there no cost-to-benefit ratio for the librarian’s time? If there are lots of reference questions, then staff the desk with reference librarians. But otherwise … .

I realize reference is different everywhere. Perhaps in your library the reference questions come fast and thick at the desk. At my library the questions often get filtered out before they make it to the desk. On the other hand, the reference desk is a great place to blog.

It’s not often that a professional interaction makes me angry. However, I had an odd experience tonight. During my regular Sunday evening chat reference shift I ended up being lectured by a library school student from an unnamed library school at a large public university in New Jersey about how my reference service needs improvement. As part of an assignment for a reference class, the library school student was supposed to go out and pester actual librarians with fake reference questions to see how they responded. I’ve read a bit about this ethically dubious practice, and in addition am able to spot a fake reference transaction pretty quickly. (Hint to library school students posing as fake reference patrons—I do this for a living. I can tell when you’re lying to me.) Something seemed fishy to me, so ultimately I responded with our standard line. Our reference service is for Princeton faculty and students or questions specific to the Princeton collection. Oh, and I don’t answer general reference questions from library school students at some other university. Then came the admission that the whole reference transaction was fake. What a surprise! And then the lecture. Spare me!

Is this what reference education is about these days? Are the students supposed to go out and waste the time of professional librarians? Because that was the impression I was left with. This student was a great big time-waster who had the erroneous opinion that a reference service at a private university should act as a general reference service for anyone in the entire world. I praised the librarians at the university the student attends and recommended the student approach them. Apparently, this wasn’t good enough. Instead, I should have played along with the game (which I suspected was a game) and spent a half hour of my time searching for items which no one actually wanted. That, apparently, is the sign of good reference service. So because I refused to help a fairly obvious liar, which is what this student was, somehow my reference service needs improvement?

What needs improvement is reference education, if this is what it has sunk to. Do teachers of reference think that librarians have nothing better to do than spend time answering fake reference questions from fake library patrons? Especially if those fake patrons more or less give the game away by saying they’re library school students at some other university who need help with a simplistic question a college sophomore would be able to answer? What else are we actual librarians to suspect given such information other than that we’re being conned? Reference librarians tend to be pretty savvy about these things. I don’t know about other reference librarians, but I resent being approached by obvious liars whose intent is to waste my time, especially when these liars are put up to their lies by their professors and then have the nerve to get self-righteous when I catch them and refuse to help them. I would be happy to help library school students or answer questions about what I do or allow students to see how I work. But that’s not what this practice is about. If students come in with obviously fake questions, it’s not my practice to play along with them. That’s not reference education. That’s a big waste of my time.

Attention, time wasters: please leave real librarians alone. Some of us have work to do.

My last post was written in a fit of pique, and understandably someone took issue with part of how I expressed my frustration. Meredith Farkas commented that “To call the student an ‘obvious liar whose intent is to waste my time’ is really awful.” That’s quite possibly true and I should have been more gentle. However, there are other things that are awful as well. Lying is awful. Deception is awful. Using people as unknowing participants in human experimentation is awful. Treating people merely as means to your own ends is awful. Betraying the implied agreement behind a reference query is awful. I opined that sending out students to ask fake reference questions is an ethically dubious practice. Today I would like to elaborate by briefly exploring the issue. I’ll approach the practice from several ethical perspectives and you can decide whether you agree with me.

First, let’s consider the Kantian perspective. You may be familiar with Kant’s categorical imperative, which says that one should act in such a way that one can will the principle behind one’s action to be universal law. Basically, don’t do it unless you think everyone should do it, or in a briefer version of the Golden Rule, do as you would be done by. This principle would, I think, preclude lying, deception, and using people as unknowing participants in some psychological reference experiment. It would also, I think, preclude wasting the time of professional librarians on fake reference questions, just to see how they responded. Would these same students and their professors want to be lied to and deceived in order to further someone else’s ends?

The other part of Kant’s ethics says you should treat people as ends in themselves, and not just as means to your ends. What is the fake reference interaction doing but using the reference librarian as an unknowing means to someone else’s ends? Most people resent being used as merely a means to someone else’s end. It might seem that reference librarians in general are always merely means to someone else’s end, but that’s not the case. If I willingly agree to participate in a certain relationship as a reference librarian, this is different than if I am deceived or manipulated. I’m here to help people answer actual reference questions. My action wills that reference librarians should answer such questions. My action does not, however, will that I be used as an unwilling guinea pig in someone else’s reference experiment. There is an implied contract in a reference transaction. You have a real information need and I help you with it. When that contract is broken by deception, then my part is ended.

Next, let’s consider the utilitarian approach. The utilitarian dictum is that an action (or a rule behind an action, depending on whether one is an act- or a rule-utilitarian) is good if it leads to the greatest happiness for the greatest number. This approach makes it less clear for this situation. Is the greatest happiness for the greatest number achieved by fake reference patrons lying to reference librarians? According to the felicific calculus, does the happiness of the fake reference patrons outweigh the resentment and unhappiness of the manipulated reference librarians?

Or we can expand this more broadly to a consequentialist approach. Instead of just considering happiness as the end, let’s consider the consequences of the action. What good consequences come from the lying and deception? Who benefits by a fake reference transaction? Does the student faking the transaction learn anything? And does this make up for the deception somehow? In my case the participant-observer approach was flawed because I spotted it. Asking an obviously fake question and then upbraiding me for not going along with the charade rankled. Thus, the fake patron didn’t learn how reference questions were answered, but instead learned how I deal with fake patrons trying to manipulate and deceive me. As the fake patron noted, things went quite well at first, but by the end the person was disappointed. We both were.

We should also consider the virtue ethics approach, derived from Aristotelian ethics. In this approach, ethics isn’t so much about rule following or calculating happiness, but about forming certain types of character in people. I think this approach makes more sense in terms of the ethical upbringing of children and the formation of character. We don’t people to have to stop and argue with themselves about whether they should lie or betray others. We want people who tell the truth and don’t betray others as a matter of habit. We want them to have a certain good character. We want people who as a matter of habit don’t deceive others just to obtain their own ends. We want reference librarians who willingly do all they can to answer legitimate reference questions or help with research problems, and we don’t want reference students who go out and lie to librarians. Is this the sort of character we want to develop in future reference librarians? You can probably see where I’m going with this, so I’ll move on.

I’d like to mention one other perspective. In his later work, Martin Heidegger discussed what he called technological thinking. Technological thinking involves considering everything that exists as a tool standing in reserve (bestand) to be used by human beings. This would include not only obvious tools such as hammers, but also the natural world as a whole. It doesn’t matter what happens to chickens or forests, for example, because they are just standing in reserve to be used by us. The ultimate problem with technological thinking is that eventually humans themselves come to be considered as tools or objects standing in reserve to be used by others at their will (consider the phrase “human resources”). This is related to Kant’s objections to considering other people as means to your ends rather than as ends in themselves. The technological thinker views everything and everyone as a tool standing in reserve to be used when appropriate. Thus, the hapless reference librarian becomes merely a tool or a means for the fake reference patron to achieve some other end.

Thus, we have a handful of ethical approaches, and it seems to me they all lead to the conclusion that lies and deception are bad things. Even if under some consequentialist approach one could justify the lies and deception and manipulation by some higher end, what is gained here? Do the fake patrons (or their professors who hand out these assignments) think that some higher end justifies lying to librarians and wasting their time? Do they think that reference librarians are so clueless that we can’t spot the faker? Do they think spotting the faker has no effect on the reference transaction? Do they think that other people are to be used as unwitting means to their own ends? That reference librarians aren’t there to help people with reference queries and research needs, but are just there as a little experimental tools for library school students to play with? Apparently, they do.

If students want to learn how I do reference, I’ll be happy to help (under the rule that it’s a good thing for librarians to willingly help library school students as I was willingly helped by librarians when I was a student). Shadow me. Interview me. Analyze my chat transcripts. See how I act when people approach me at the desk. Watch me from afar or a-close all you want. Read the reference behavioral guidelines that I helped write. But don’t lie to me and try to deceive me.

If however, after all this, you or your professor decide that your ends somehow justify using reference librarians as your tools and you still choose to lie and try to deceive them because they’re not worthy of respect as busy professionals or even as human beings and ends in themselves, then you should be a much better liar than this person was. Practice that lying and deception until you have it down to a fine art. It won’t make you much of a reference librarian or even a decent human being, but at least the librarian won’t be left feeling manipulated and betrayed and you might achieve whatever end you think justifies your means.

A couple of posts ago I took a stance that was apparently controversial. That’s not like me. I usually save my controversial opinions for lunchtime conversation after making sure I’m not being recorded surreptitiously. After I criticized lies and deception in fake reference, someone very rightly asked if I meant just the particular type of deception that particular library school student tried to use on me, which had nothing to do with assessment as such, or did I instead mean to question the value of all so-called unobtrusive reference assessment that makes use of such deception. Just to clarify, I am definitely questioning the value of such assessment, and indeed do not believe that the end (producing a research article that might or might not be useful) justifies the means (lying to and deceiving people). I believe such practices are ethically suspect, as should be clear by now.

The commenter, Steven Chabot, rightly notes that “unobtrusive evaluation of reference services is a generally accepted methodology when investigating questions of the quality of reference service. Are we then to say that all of these useful studies completed by actual librarians and scholars in the field are wasting librarians’ time?”

Such deception is indeed a generally accepted methodology, but I think it should not be. Fraud is fraud, and I don’t see how the means justifies the end here. If the end is vitally important and can be achieved by no other means, then just maybe, but such is not the case here. Such lies and deception are ethically unsound and are unnecessary to boot.

And yes, they are a waste of librarians’ time, which is why it doesn’t surprise me that every one of these unobtrusive studies that I’ve read has been conducted by non-librarians. Perhaps we should have librarians posing as fake students in library school courses evaluating the teaching effectiveness and feedback on assignments. Then we can all have a discussion on the ethics and effectiveness of deception.

He apparently had a similar assignment in library school, and “had to cite relevant other unobtrusive studies, such as the classic by Hernon and McClure (1986) which posited the whole ‘55 percent rule’: that only 55% of transactions are satisfying to the user. How are we to improve that statistic without precise measurement of it first?”

Here we get into tricky ground, indeed. I have to disagree on so many levels. Perhaps this is heresy among librarians, but I will boldly state first, that I don’t think the so-called “55% Rule” tells us much about the state of reference in any given library; second, that I don’t think such studies in general provide a “precise measurement” of anything useful; and third, that there are ways to assess reference without resorting to lies and deception.

What follows is primarily an excerpt from an annotated bibliography I wrote on reference assessment a couple of years ago. If you want to read the whole thing, you can find it here:

“Best of the Literature: Reference Assessment.” Public Services Quarterly. 2: 2/3 (July 2006), 215-220.

Part of my opinion of the 55% Rule, which I never completely trusted, was formed by the following article:

Hubbertz, Andrew. “The Design and Interpretation of Unobtrusive Evaluations.” Reference & User Services Quarterly 44, no. 4 (Summer 2005): 327-35.

Hubbertz provides an excellent, sustained critique of the normal methods of unobtrusive evaluation of reference services, arguing that for the evaluations to be useful and meaningful the subjects need to be given uniform tests, that the results need to be interpreted to provide a comparison rather than an overall assessment of reference service quality, and that the one area in which such observations may be useful is to evaluate the ways libraries organize their collections and deliver services. His analysis of various published studies of unobtrusive evaluations shows them to be inconsistent and “for practical purposes, nearly worthless.” Not administering uniform tests “may be a principal culprit for these perplexing and disappointing results.” He criticizes in particular the domination of the “55 percent rule,” arguing clearly that such evaluations are designed specifically to generate middle range results, and in fact test reference questions that almost no one or almost everyone answers are excluded from the evaluations. Thus, the evaluations are designed to generate something like a 55% success rate. Hubbertz amusingly shows how we can design the tests to improve the rate of reference success. While middle range results may be useful for comparing the services of different libraries or different ways of providing reference service in the same library, they are useless for determining the overall quality of reference service. He concludes that in the future unobtrusive evaluations may have some use, but they “must be properly implemented, with a uniform test and an adequate sample and [their] application must be limited to the assessment of how best to manage library resources.”

Another article questioning the use of deceptive (err, unobtrusive) evaluation is the following article:

Jensen, Bruce. “The Case for Non-Intrusive Research: A Virtual Reference Librarian’s Perspective.” The Reference Librarian 85 (2004): 139-49.

Jensen argues against applying typical methods of unobtrusive reference evaluation to virtual reference services, because of both practical and ethical concerns. Practically, having pseudo-patrons ask fake questions online does not take advantage of the wealth of transcripts of virtual reference questions available to researchers. Ethically, such evaluation is “an irresponsible misuse of the time of librarians and research assistants” and can degrade the service, though, he notes, “there will always be researchers convinced that their own work somehow trumps the work and lives of the people under study.” This argument both further develops and contrasts with that of Hubbertz, developing the ethical critique of unobtrusive evaluation more and extending the criticism to the evaluation of virtual reference, but not considering the problems with typical unobtrusive evaluation of traditional reference services. He concludes with a call for more research on virtual reference that takes advantage of the wealth of transcripts available, shares the research findings with the objects of study, and does not attempt to deceive virtual reference librarians with pseudo-patrons and false questions.

Curiously, Jensen deems acceptable such methods to evaluate traditional reference services as “the price that must be paid for an intimate view of the reference desk from the user’s side.” Only here do I disagree with Jensen, since I don’t believe deception and time-wasting are worth the price to be paid.

Arnold and Kaske give us an example of such a study based on transcripts:

Arnold, Julie, and Neal Kaske. “Evaluating the Quality of a Chat Service.” portal: Libraries and the Academy 5, no. 2 (2005): 177-193.

Arnold and Kaske establish a clear criterion by which to evaluate their chat reference service: providing correct answers. Using the categories of reference questions supplied by William Katz in his Introduction to Reference Work, the authors analyze 419 questions in 351 transcripts of chat reference transactions at the University of Maryland and provide a model for assessing the value of that service. After coding and classifying the questions, they studied what types of users (students, faculty, other campus persons, outsiders, etc.) asked which types of questions (directional, ready reference, specific search, research, policy and procedural, and holdings/do you own?) and how often those users got a correct answer. Policy and procedural questions topped the list of almost all user groups and represented 41.25% of the total, followed by “specific search (19.66 percent), holdings/do you own (15.59 percent), ready reference (14.15 percent), directional (6.24 percent), and research (3.12 percent).” “Students (41.3 percent), outsiders (25.1 percent), [and] other UM individuals (22.0 percent)” asked the bulk of the questions, and the librarians staffing the service answered the questions correctly 91.72% of the time. Different user groups tended to ask different types of questions. Since other studies of reference transactions have claimed that reference questions are correctly answered about 55% of the time, the authors conclude that future research should study this apparent discrepancy. However, in light of Hubbertz’s study the discrepancy may be less puzzling.

Thus, it would seem that I’m certainly not the only one who believes that deception is ethically tolerable for assessing chat reference. However, there’s still the reference desk. Is deception ethically tolerable there? Certainly not. But is it even necessary?

For an alternative to the deceptive model of reference desk assessment, see the following article:

Moysa, Susan. “Evaluation of Customer Service Behaviour at the Reference Desk in an Academic Library.” Feliciter 50, no. 2 (2004): 60-63.

Moysa describes in a concise and readable article the process used by her library to evaluate their librarians’ customer service behaviors. Basing its criteria upon the ALA Reference and User Services Association’s “Guidelines for Behavioral Performance of Reference and Information Services Professionals” (1996) [ed. note: rev. in 2004, referenced above], the reference department used a combination of self-assessment and observation. Moysa considers both the ethical problems of unobtrusive evaluation and the practical problem that normal observation affects behavior. She concludes that the literature indicates that observation over a sustained time eliminates many of the negative practical effects and notes that having the reference staff participate in the process of creating this evaluation model from the beginning mitigates most of the ethical objections. Moysa has described a method of evaluation and assessment that deliberately avoids lies and deception, and for the reference desk at that, so it would seem that we both disagree with Jensen that deception is the price we pay for reference assessment.

Thus, there are other ways to assess reference. Then the question becomes, how are we to improve the quality of reference. Rather than (or at least in addition to) these sorts of ethically sound assessment tools, we should spend much more time thinking about the education, training, and culture of reference, and especially of the proper character required of a good reference librarian. If we have reference librarians with the proper ethos, the character appropriate to their profession—educated, intellectually curious, driven by a desire and equipped with a capacity to solve information problems, practiced in the appropriate ways to respond to various audiences, adaptable to changing circumstances—and a culture that supports them, then we won’t need such reference assessment, because good reference will take care of itself.

Like most reference librarians, I don’t like it when I can’t answer a question or find a source someone needs. I try not to be one of those librarians who keeps plying the patron with more and more sources until they start backing away from me with a look of terror, but I don’t like people to go away empty-handed.

Last week I had two occurrences of empty-handedness, and both led to the same feeling of frustration I always get when this happens. One student was looking for recent articles responding to a particular chapter of a 30-year-old philosophy book. This is still a standard work by a very prominent legal philosopher, but I could find no evidence of anyone ever responding to this particular chapter, much less anything recent. Another patron wanted some biographical information about an obscure German artist. (Actually, the query began, “I want an obituary for X person.”) The artist was so obscure there’s hardly a mention on the entire web, and no available biographical information in English or German, as far as I can tell.

As far as I can tell. Ay, there’s the rub. For ultimately, how far can we tell? At what point can we say with certainty that something doesn’t exist, at least something that isn’t inherently contradictory. If someone wanted help to find a squared circle, I might point them to Thomas Hobbes’ claims to have squared the circle, but I certainly couldn’t find a squared circle or any other absurd thing. But these reference objects aren’t inherently absurd. There very well could be biographical information about this obscure German artist, or a recent article responding to a particular chapter of a 30-year-old philosophy book. These things aren’t self-contradictory. They’re not impossible, just improbable. And so the reference transaction ends, as it must, with my saying that while I can’t confirm that such a reference object does not exist, I have exhausted the known resources without being able to find the thing.

I think what we reference librarians need is a reference source that lists all of the questions for which we know there is no answer. Then I could go to this source, look up the obscure German artist, and say, “See, it says here that no biographical information exists on this person, and this is the authoritative reference source on the nonexistence of nonabsurd reference objects. Do you have any other questions?” A source like this would let me rest easier after a fruitless search. It could be, though, that this reference source already exists, and I just can’t find it. If only I could know for sure.