3. Instantaneous gratification

[deborah]

Continued from Ease of self service.

3. Instantaneous gratification

Here the librarian can help infrastructurally (writing better search tools, providing proactive instruction, improving the metadata). But in this day and age, users are accustomed to scheduling themselves so that when they need to find something, the needed now. The need it from their desktops, without moving, without picking up the phone, and without speaking with another human being. I'm not sure there's any assistance in librarian can given that situation besides providing the infrastructure and education before the moment of need.

So that was my long blathering. Thoughts?

Comments

[cnoocy]

What, library reference desks don't have IM? That's actually a serious suggestion. (Though one that could get hairy.) I can certainly envision a researcher opening an IM window to the library and asking for info in the middle of working on a project.

[temvald.livejournal.com]

The Too Much Information problem is certainly one where a good reference librarian can make a difference. Having a quick place that you can go to that not only has information on a topic, but actually categorizes the information as introductory (with links back to topics that are prerequisites to understanding the current topics), advanced, or related can be a big time saver. Often I find that when I'm searching for information on how to do something that I don't have much background in, half of my time is spent doing wide-ranging searches just to build up my jargon vocabulary to the point that I can do a good search.

Somewhere like Wikipedia can be very useful in handling this problem, but as you hit more esoteric subjects... Well, it's still likely that Wikipedia will cover them. Still, that is not always the case.