CILIP in London Meeting 13 September 2012
Guinness Book of World Records 2013 publication day
A talk by Gary Archer, Information Services Librarian, Solihull Central Library
Gary Archer presented an overview of information provision in reference libraries over the past 30 years, during his working life in public reference services and in research.
“Are public libraries finished?” is a popular starting point for debate. Cheap books and comprehensive schooling have ended the culture of the autodidact, previously our most reliable customer. How does the librarian find a purpose?
Looking back to 1981 there was a plethora of printed standard sources. The published output was also growing, with such things as the DK Eyewitness and Chronicle series, and newspaper Notes and Queries columns. Many libraries had specialist staff and maintained their own information files, and Whitaker's Almanac published an interleaved version for libraries to add their own notes. Complex enquiries were often handled by phoning up likely experts or writing them letters. This fuelled a lively publishing scene, watched over by Charles Toase with his regular column “Reference books you may have missed”, and was the basis of the library service. The image of the library was very positive and even made it onto US sitcoms like Seinfeld.
The first generation of text-based electronic information services arrived in the 1970s and survived (Minitel in France) until June 2012. The real impact of IT began with CD-ROMS replacing print sources for directories and business information, but the data was no more current than in the print version, although Dunn and Bradstreet issued more frequent updates.
The introduction of graphical interfaces in the 1980s made the internet more accessible, and it was the launch of Hotmail in 1996 that brought major public interaction with the web. Suddenly e-mail became the communication medium of choice. EARL (the Consortium for Public Library Networking) launched in November 1997. The People's Network was available in libraries from 2004, when most home connections were still dial-up. In the USA “Stumpers” started in 1992 as an e-mail list for co-operating on enquiries. Wikipedia (for better or worse) was founded in 2001.
Still there has been a growing public interest in esoteric facts, reflected in the popularity of quiz shows, and the books, TV and web presence of QI. There has been a migration between formats, from print (or T shirt) to electronic services and back.
But the decade also marked a decline in traditional reference books. Guinness pruned its list, and the significance of its records has declined. TSO (HMSO that was), rail timetables, Chemical Abstracts have all abandoned print. The telephone directories and yellow pages are but shadows. This is “dinosaur publishing” and publishers are questioning their role too.
What effect has this had on libraries? Internet sources are available at libraries, but the expectations of users have changed. If there is a queue at the reference desk, then people will walk away. People expect to be their own reference librarians, they expect an instant response and they expect it to come from a computer. Librarians have become the public face of Google. Online services have helped us here, especially where libraries have been forced into reducing opening hours. Commercial phone services cost around £1.00, and often their researchers use a library. Why aren't we cutting out the middle man? There is now no clear agreement on what is general knowledge. There is an age divide in responses to media, as there is in the use of smart phones.
The unreliability of online sources is common knowledge to librarians. Wikipedia has had to revisit its hands-off approach to editing, for instance locking down the entry on George W. Bush. One of our members highlighted her practice of making her school pupils edit a Wikipedia entry, just to show how easily it could be done and why a critical approach was needed.
Librarians can show how to exercise “information discretion”. Often users don't question what's out there, and what are appropriate sources, and the importance of domain – .com, .co.uk, .edu, .ac.uk – for assessing the trustworthiness of information. Information and misinformation can appear very quickly and portable devices accelerate this trend. Twitter has killed off quite a number of still-living celebrities.
Enquire on the People's Network by MLA has 72 current local authority library subscribers, and this means that a reference interview can be carried on by chat. This is our unique selling point, tailoring the detail and level (PhD or crossword puzzle) needed in an answer.
Interactivity is the great bonus of online information, but paper sources which remain available after subscriptions have lapsed, and which can be archived relatively simply (unlike the huge mass of rapidly changing online sources) have their own advantages. The British Library does harvest websites by permission, but the harvesting of commercial websites will remain a problem even after imminent legislation comes into force.
