cerning free reference resources. Among her responsibilities at the IPL are the coordination of the Frequently Asked Reference Question (FARQ) pages, the Pathfinder pages, and the Native American Authors collection. Having earned her master’s degree from the School of Information at the University of Michigan in December of 1998, Memmott also oversees the many dedicated librarians-in-training and professional librarians who volunteer their time to answering reference questions for the service.
INSIDER’S VIEWPOINT FROM YOUR WEB LIBRARY PROFESSIONAL:
PATRICIA MEMMOTT, USER SERVICES COORDINATOR, THE INTERNET
PUBLIC LIBRARY
NT: The Internet Public Library answers between 8,000 and 9,000 reference questions per year. David Carter and Joseph Janes indicated that the subject breakdown for reference queries at the IPL showed that most questions concerned sci- ence, history, literature, biography, and the humanities.11 Is there a preponderance of questions in any one subject area?
PM: It’s basically spread all over the place with no real stand- outs. Also, the majority are not “ready reference”—we do a breakdown of our questions into two categorizations—factual (ready reference) and sources (research type questions where
we get the patron started on a topic), and on average only 27 percent are categorized as factual.
NT:Could you offer some numbers on the breakdown of users of the IPL’s reference service?
PM: Essentially, we know that about 52 percent of our ques- tions are homework/school-related. The rest run the gamut from business people (25 percent), teachers (11 percent), librarians (7 percent).
NT:What do you consider the top ready reference Web sites on the Web—the ones the IPL librarians themselves use exten- sively and consider reliable sources of information? Do any of them excel for certain types of queries and not for others?
PM:A list of ones I teach to new IPL students and use exten- sively is available at http://www.ipl.org:2000/backroom/class/
freeweb.html. [See list at the end of this chapter for individual addresses.] There’s a few that I might add to those, which are available through links in the IPL reference collection at http://www.ipl.org/ref/RR/static/ref00.00.00.html. They include:
Bartleby, http://www.bartleby.com Infoplease, http://www.infoplease.com Internet Movie Database, http://imdb.com American FactFinder, http://factfinder.census.gov NADA Appraisal Guides, http://www.nadaguides.com FindArticles, http://www.findarticles.com
Babelfish, http://babelfish.altavista.com
I don’t know how I would go about indicating what types of queries they might answer better than others. It’s mainly an intu- itive thing—you look at the question, where they indicated they’ve already searched, and make your determination that you’re either going to go to a search engine or straight to a known resource that you think will answer their question. Most of the time, to be honest, I go straight to a search engine. If it’s a case of a younger student or a businessperson whom only needs a little bit of factual info on a topic, then yes, I’ll go straight to an online encyclopedia, almanac, or another ready reference site. The older students, though, generally need more extensive information and that’s where a search engine is usu- ally more fruitful, to me, now that the more academic ready ref- erence sources like Britannica are no longer free.
NT:To what extent do you believe end-users could have most of their ready reference questions answered by resources such as the reference collection at Bartleby or other reference resources? If they knew of the correct sites, could end-users find most of their own ready reference answers?
PM:I suspect they already are doing just that. We get so few easy ready reference questions that I believe that those people with ready reference questions are getting what they need from search engines. What we do get, instead, are the people who are looking for information on research topics where Web info is scanty or unreliable, or hard to find. I had a student who did some research into our answers to see what sources we were referring patrons to—less than 20 percent of our answers end up using sources already listed in the IPL’s reference collection.
NT:Do you think the typical Web surfer is satisfied with what they find?
PM: Will they find an answer that they consider to be “good enough” for most of those questions? I think it depends on their domain-specific subject knowledge. A businessperson may very well know the resources they need to look up share prices, while a high school student may use a search engine and be happy with outdated info from a newspaper article. A parent doing taxes might very well not succeed and then will try to get their search mediated by a library if they want to be sure of reli- able information.
NT: What can Web reference sources do that print resources cannot? What can the print resources do that the Web resources can’t?
PM:The Web harnesses the power of full-text searching in a way that a print resource (and its table of contents or index) never can, and that’s its greatest strength. Have a poetry identifi- cation question involving a line that isn’t the first or last line? Plug it into a search engine or Bartleby—instant gratification—assum- ing the patron remembered it correctly and the poem isn’t from a greeting card. Unfortunately, the majority of the content lacks any sort of useful authority, which is where print resources get their strength. Editorial review process, subject indexing. Great things, and not easily separated out on the Web.
NT: Is it possible to have a free ready reference collection gleaned from Web sites in lieu of a print reference collection? Is this what the Internet Public Library already has?
PM:I don’t think we’re there yet, and I don’t think that day is coming for a long while. Yes, you can answer a certain percent- age of ready reference questions using free Web resources. No, you can’t answer all of them. Also, it seems like for every new source that comes up on the Web for free, two more are taken down to go to a fee model. As ad revenues continue to wilt, I don’t think most of what I’ve grown to use daily in answering IPL questions will be around this time next year, since this time last year I was able to use World Book (on DiscoverySchool), Britannica, and Compton’s for free and now they’re all gone.
Bartleby seems like it will hold on, but FindArticles?—I wouldn’t get attached to it. Will that hamper my ability to answer ques- tions? Yes, but I also still have the option of doing Web searches and sifting through sites to see if I can find other reliable sources.
And when that doesn’t work, I can refer people to titles likely to be in their local library’s print collection. It’s not what they want to hear most of the time, but it’s better than the whole-lot-of-drivel they’ll get otherwise from the Web.
Conclusion
At the start of this chapter, in my example of happily finding an online dictionary, I mentioned the modest beginnings of the Internet as a conveyer of information to a universal audience.
When the Internet was first being explored by the public, the inno- vators in electronic publishing were computer enthusiasts, infor- mation specialists, librarians, and amateurs who had little personal gain at stake, but wanted to make free access to informa- tion a reality. Along with the efforts of these individuals came
innovations from commercial publishers such as the Merriam- Webster site. These free commercial sites for concise reference information, usually aimed at marketing more lengthy print resources or Web subscriptions, combined with the Web sites of educational institutions and dedicated individuals, has made an array of reference information available that rivals fee-based resources.
In this case, access to the free information is worth several thou- sands of dollars in terms of what you would spend on subscrip- tions or one-time purchases. A great deal of physical space is being saved, thankfully, because few individual households could store all these works. We can easily adapt, manipulate, and manage information from the Web sites. They aren’t, as Professor Péter Jacsó says, “the poor person’s reference sources” but “the smart person’s reference sources.”
S
AMPLEA
NNUALS
AVINGSBartleby.com $1,000
Country information $1,000
Sparknotes $1,000
“Top Reference Books”/“Surrogates” $1,000s Authoritative health resources priceless
Updated materials priceless
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