The Changing Role of Reference

During my first years at CCVI Library, substantive reference requests from students were common. Nowadays I can count the number in a month on one hand. Obviously this is result of the advent of online information sources and changing student perception of how information is obtained. This article from Duke University takes a wide-ranging look at how reference services relate to the new paradigm. The details are from a university library perspective, but many of the problems and perhaps the solutions are relevant to school libraries. For example, real-time online reference could be an interesting experiment. The tools needed to try it already exist. RR