Relevance of academic reference librarians

[deborah]

I've got some thoughts I've been pondering about some problems which are probably specific to academic reference librarianship, although I may be incorrect about that. I've been formulating these ideas for a while (with much help from cnoocy and tahnan), and I'm just going to brainstorm some ideas onto the page. Because there's a lot here, and going to break this up into multiple posts. I'm partly during this just organize my thoughts, but I would love to hear input and feedback from y'all. Am I oversimplifying, missing things, over complicating? Are these solved problems?

The question is one of relevance. What purpose does a reference librarian serve in an era of:

1. Openly available materials (reference materials on the open Web)
2. Ease of self-service
3. A perception of an absolute necessity for instantaneous gratification

Continued at openly available materials.

Comments

[bunnyjadwiga.livejournal.com]

This is where specialist librarians come in. Our job is to know something about the structure of the information world and also about searching, so that we can help our patrons find their way around the information/publishing construct.

Furthermore, academic librarians have a further task that is currently labelled information literacy, which is conveying that sense of the knowledge map and how to navigate it to undergraduates and graduate students to some extent.

[deborah]

I'm very much hoping to be a specialist librarian for exactly this reason. Still, at the senior researcher level, surely the researchers aren't dealing with the vast mass of the information world, but with very specifically polled for information which they've requested.

On the other hand, they only know how to poll for that information is the academic and specialist academic librarians have taught them when they were undergraduates in graduate students. Hmm, interesting... I'm so used to thinking of tenured professors as hatched from the egg fully formed, like cranky absent-minded Athenas in tweed jackets from the head of Zeus.