LIS Student, Meet Guide to Reference

Bob Kieft, general editor of ALA’s Guide to Reference, talks to LIS students whenever he gets the chance. During Midwinter in Seattle, he spoke to students and librarians at University of Washington on their career day. Getting off the beaten convention center track is always a treat. Seattle local Cindy Cunningham of Corbis, formerly of Amazon, and further back an undergraduate library assistant working with Kieft at Stanford, drove us out and gave us a quick tour of UW’s library, a mix of modern and traditional with its classic reading room.

Guide to Reference Books was first published in 1902. Long the canon of reference service, the venerable GRB, Kieft admits, may get more respect than use. Kieft outlined these questions that he and his team face as they invigorate GRB with an online makeover.

1. How do we account for changes in scholarship with the organization of content. especially in age of the Web?
2. What does it mean for Guide to be part of network of resources?
3. What is the online equivalent of guidance?
4. What do we lose when reference moves from print to online?
5. Can we restore the Guide to the library school curriculum?
6. How do we create a distributed contributor structure center with a light central editorial center?
7. How to integrate electronic and print publication in one subject directory?
8. How do we account for changes in reference publishing and reference services?
9. What is reference anyway?

I was pleasantly surprised to hear Kieft at the beginning of his talk put out a call for contributors to the Guide. Could there be room for these newbies in the Land of Reference Giants? Well, it was career day. Kieft said that academic libraries need young people who are willing to take on a middle manager role; and (this is where the Guide comes in) people who know instructional technology and can use it in a hip way.

New librarians will be defining today’s sphere of reference service. Any digital natives ready to bravely venture out to the Guide’s new section Web as Reference Source? The one Kieft says, with irony, that will put us all out of business. Any takers? We have an outline, thanks to Kelly Mueller, who unfortunately had to step aside due to the obligations of a new job.