The Future of Academic Reference Desks

This is excerpted from the article by Todd Gilman, "The Four Habits of Highly Effective Librarians," which ran in the May 23, 2007, issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education.  I see parallels here with our continuing discussions about the future of traditional journalism. ELW

"Academic libraries today are witnessing a drastic decrease in the number of in-depth reference questions asked at traditional reference desks -- whether in person, by phone, through e-mail messages, or via virtual reference systems. It's a striking trend, and even frightening to some librarians, because we do not know the cause, what we should be doing about it, or how it may affect staffing in the not-so-distant future.

Are reference librarians becoming obsolete? Surely not in this age of ever-more-complicated searching for information in ever-growing cadres of largely idiosyncratic databases. But are reference desks becoming obsolete? Apparently so, at least as they are currently conceived.

So central has that question become that Columbia University 's 2007 Reference Services Symposium in March devoted a substantial portion of the day's proceedings to a debate between two senior library administrators over whether the academic library reference desk will still exist five years from now ("Be it resolved: There will be no reference desks in large academic libraries in 2012").

Based on a show of hands, the majority of listeners agreed that the reference desk would still exist -- even after hearing all the evidence that gave the remaining listeners pause. Or perhaps the majority defended the reference desk's future precisely because of the evidence they heard.

Did all of those people believe what they voted, or were they, in part, hoping against hope -- trying to revive a dying loved one by wishing her back to life?

Indeed, it is telling that the two debaters themselves chose to focus exclusively on the value of the reference desk, a philosophical question, rather than on the topic as it was given to them: the viability of the reference desk, a practical question of supply and demand."