The Librarian and Mr. Jeeves

Abstract

Necessitates that reference librarians revolutionize their service approach if they're to stay in business. ack in 1999, Intel CEO Andy Grove predicted, Within five years, all businesses will be Internet businesses, or they won't be in business at all. Harsh though that prophecy may be, we may already see the signs of its truth in the area of reference services. In Determining Our Digital Destiny (AL, Jan., p. 54-58) Roy Tennant wrote, Statistics collected by the Association of Research Libraries (available at fisher.lib.virginia.edu/newarl/) indicate that the number of reference queries handled per professional staff member has gone down over the last two years at a number of ARL libraries. One can only conjecture as to the reason, but my money is on the Internet. Since 1998, the Libref online discussion group (listserv.kent.edu/ archives/librei-l.html) has hosted an ongo ing conversation on falling reference statis tics, with participants reporting declines of anywhere from 6% to 15% per year. Accord ing to the National Center for Education Statistics, reference statistics for all aca demic libraries fell by almost 10% from 2.1 million per week in 1994 to 1.9 million per week in 1996 (the latest dates covered). About the only bright spot is the NCES sta tistics on public library reference traffic, which actually increased by a little over 2% from 278.95 million in 1995 to 284.96 mil lion in 1996. Overall reference seems to be a service that, if not in absolute decline, is certainly not growing vigorously.