Bryan - Parts 2 and 3

Part 2

Part two was the more useful of the two parts from my experiences. I was able to practice both aspects of a reference interview in a friendly safe environment (though the devil's advocate nature of the exercise lead to some awkwardness on both parts.) I feel like I got a lot out of being able to practice the actual process of the interview as well as some out of being difficult for my partner.

Part 3

I was not really comfortable with part 3, I used the same question that I had posed to my partner to the IM Reference desk at SJPL and though only drilling down to specific information preference was asking whether I'd prefer a print or online source, and when I specified online I was more or less pointed at Google with a fairly basic search string garnered from my original post. I think that it was a case of the librarian assuming that I was seeking general knowledge and not taking the time to drill down deeper.

Reading through other peoples responses to this part it seems like most of the people choose to contact the college academic libraries and were displeased with curt responses. I'm curious to what degree the general expectations differ between reference information provided by staff between public libraries like ours (which I would presume follow similar guild lines to our own) and an academic library in which staff is more likely to be confronted with more specialized information requests on a regular basis and can also assume a greater degree of competency with their patrons gathering information with limited direction. My own experiences with a few different academic libraries has shown general studies campuses having massive collections as well as access to numerous different specialized databases and the standard Internet research tools that are ubiquitously available. I would almost expect to see a different set of standards applied to academic libraries where librarians knowledge of subject matter is generally going to be eclipsed by all but newer students and make it so it's difficult for the librarians to have the capability to filter content as effectively as students studying particular topics.

Example: a third year student of business accounting can likely more accurate assess the quality and pertinence of specific resources more readily than a librarian could due to the students specialized knowledge and training regarding the specifics of that branch of information and simply directing them to specific databases or areas of the collection, or even helping them work on phrasing for search strings to be more applicable.

Whereas it is not unreasonable to expect that a reference librarian at a public library may well be Fielding a more generalized question from someone not familiar with the field at all or the tools to find that information. In the scenario for a public librarian it is not unreasonable to assume that the staff should not only be able to offer up a degree of expertise using the tools available to find information, they should also be able to provide some basic filtering abilities to screen for accurate and customer appropriate sources (ie. the first thing you would hand to an 8 year old may not be a collection of tax codes when they have questions about businesses, or conversely handing Business Tax For Dummies to someone looking for a more specific book on qualifying deductibles for their business in fiscal 2008.) In an academic library it is more likely that you would be dealing with two/three basic degrees of source detail ranging from first year students in introductory classes (which would likely be similar repeating questions on a semester basis that can be refined over time), general interest information, and more advanced research. In all cases it is reasonable to assume a high level of competence as the general patronage would be comprised primarily of college students to whom a level of expertise could be in assumed in good faith.