“I’m struck by how my techniques for verifying truth on the internet led me to believe that the Stillman award was fake when it wasn’t.”

I think this *would* be a fantastic thing to have a group of sixth graders look at! At LOEX a couple of years ago - 2005 I think it was - I saw a presentation on evaluating information that I really liked. I kind of went to it by accident, but it stuck with me more than any other session at that conference. And the thing that the presenter said that stuck with me was that the information literacy skill/concept/knowledge that her students lacked was not the ability to find information, and was not the ability to evaluate the information they found - it was knowing when to stop.

She showed how the evaluation skills they’d learned taught them to find the reason why a piece of information was bad, and then once they found that out they had been taught or they had learned to give up on the ideas and the content in that information too. Sometimes that’s fine - sometimes when you do that you really miss out. Knowing when to stop - there’s so much thinking and understanding captured in that statement.

I probably would have stopped too early here. The piece of actually calling someone and talking to a person - that’s a block for me.

this is a terrific story! i’m totally impressed by your ref-fu actually. i always think one thing that keeps me from being a truly great reference librarian is my reluctance to pick up the phone, when that’s what it takes.

i wanted to add that this totally cracked me up because i read the L-Net transcripts in my RSS reader and had read that transaction a few days ago! when i first started reading your post i was thinking “this all seems really familiar…”

See, I feel terrible I picked up the phone before I even searched Google Books specifically. Lay-Z, beyond a reasonable doubt.

I think I was fascinated with this activity because we’re always cautioning people that Things On The Internet Might Not Be True, and even, Books Can Be Wrong, and here they both were, or so I thought, and even then there’s still a ton of misinformation about Ringo out there. I think I stopped when I could imagine a plausible explanation for that.

I did also look up the Steiners’ home telephone number, but decided against calling them. I probably stopped in the right place.

it’s clear that if you ever decide to give up the librarian racket you’d be an awesome journalist! How hilarious would it have been if you’d called the Steiners!?

i was also struck here that part of the issue was that you had what seemed like a pretty classic ready reference type question (and, indeed, once you matched it to the right source it pretty much was) so when you looked to Google, to Wikipedia and didn’t find anything about this known, named thing it rang alarm bells for you. I have this happen all the time at the reference desk. I’ll happily help students through complex questions all day long and then I get completely thrown for a loop when they come asking for something that seems so…look-up-able. I was talking to anne-marie about my performance anxiety around this particular issue once and she pointed out that we’re really not operating in the reference room of old, where there really were far fewer options in terms of matching a source to a question. “Back in the day” it was a lot easier and more automatic for a reference librarian to think “award? i’ll look in that Gale reference to awards, prizes, and honors”. These days ANYONE is going to think “i’ll Google it”. And, typically, we find something we can build on. When we find nothing, or find things that don’t advance our search, i think it can be hard for librarians of our…generation?…to take a step back. Or maybe i should just speak for myself when i say this. I guess, also, very experienced reference librarians have such an intimate knowledge of their collections that that sort of source matching is more automatic for them as well. Anyway…what was i saying?

I think it was Dave Lankes who pointed out to me that the library literature of reference has shifted from a discussion of sources to a discussion of techniques for delivering reference service. Not to say that that there hasn’t been works on reference technique before, but it has come to dominate the literature since the 90s.

I’m certainly not someone who works from a knowledge of sources, even though I was taught reference that way. I get very little practice in reference that isn’t rush rush rush (!)

I think that it’s more than that a finite knowledge of sources is easier to work with (it’s hard to build that knowledge!), but that the part of my brain dedicated to reference is focused on changing it into something that assumes sources, patrons, and contexts outside of libraries.

Specifically, we still tend to treat reference service as a single point of contact between the library (the world of information) and the patron.

On eBay, if I’m bidding or selling, I can know how many other people are bidding or watching the auction. There’s at least two dimensions to the transaction. With AskMetafilter, dozens of people will answer me if I ask a good question. Texting and social networks are popular because they are about relationships, not points of contact. I get e-mail when you comment on this post!

So there’s been this discussion at David Lee King’s blog this past week. King (Lee King?) criticizes the way libraries communicate service expectations in virtual reference and there’s a great discussion followed by some bitter words and challenges. I think it’s great that people are thinking and talking about this issue and I’ve been encouraging people to participate.

But for me, the discussion is maddening. It boils down to this: if you only assume you are going to interact with patrons at a point of question and answer, damn right you are going to have a hard time explaining what the hell your service is about.

We still characterize virtual reference as different from face-to-face reference because of visual queues and time spent, and actually, what we’ve learned, or what I think we’ve learned, or what I’ve learned, is that in fact what makes virtual reference different than in-person reference, is that 99% of the time, patrons have equal access to, and often equal or better skill at using the primary reference tools at our disposal.

And we are just going to ignore this? Don’t touch me, don’t look over my shoulder, don’t participate, you give me a question and I’ll give you an answer?

And I’m feeling like the only reason this doesn’t go for in-person reference these days is that it’s so fucking hard to get on the internet at the library if you don’t bring your own laptop.

Rant over?

Probably this all has something to do with Amy VanScoy’s research on reference librarians’ ‘theories of practice’ that I’m hungry to see and read more of.

I would definitely feel like an ass calling the Steiners, in part because the cat was 5 in 1995 when he did the deed, and might have passed on since then. Hi, can I talk about the cat that saved your life that is now probably dead? I just wanted to find out if it was true. No, the part about saving your life.

is “ref-fu” hipster librarian speak for “kung-fu”?

and you’re right that it’s frustrating when a patron (um, like, me) goes to the trouble of hitting up a reference librarian (ref-lib?) for info and the librarian does all the searches I’ve already done (such as your Google and Wikipedia searches).

I know it’s sort of ridiculous to expect all reference librarians to have a HAL-like knowledge of every reliable (and unreliable?) reference source out there, but that’s basically my attitude: This is the expert, I’ve run out of ideas, they’d better have some GREAT ideas for me. No wonder I’m usually disappointed.

I also think that Lay-Z is a great rapper name for sloths.

joke explainer - “reasonable doubt” is the name of jay-z’s first album; ‘ref-fu’: if ‘fu’ is knowledge (and magic per kung-fu cinema), apply it as a suffix to anything. kitchen-fu, reference-fu, scrabble-fu. but of course ‘fu’ doesn’t mean that at all, but i think you took the meaning from context.

librarians definitely need to do better than google, that’s part of what i’m talking about - but not because the librarians should have the knowledge of sources, but because we should be engaging patrons in conversation, sharing tools and working together. to do that, we need to overlap with people’s lives more than just at the question/answer junction.

one of the librarians i consulted with on this project suggested, in order to find out who had won the award, that i find all the periodicals the association published and find out if the award was regularly announced in any of them, or if there was a special issue that listed the awards. now, if this had worked it would have been AMAZING, but it sort of felt like chasing down loose ends just because we had the reference books to do it. and that was the thing, the technique was dependent entirely on specific sources to carry it out, including access to the periodicals listed. you can tell it is going to fail when you don’t carry any periodicals published by that organization. still, i wouldn’t have thought of that technique on my own.