New Concepts in Digital Reference

Citation

Smith, A.G. (2011), "New Concepts in Digital Reference", The Electronic Library, Vol. 29 No. 3, pp. 411-412. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640471111141160

The Synthesis Lectures are an interesting publishing format: each volume is an introductory review of specialist topics by subject experts. The “lectures” are made available online as PDFs and as print volumes. While the genesis of the project was in engineering topics, New Concepts in Digital Reference is part of a series on information services, and gives the well‐established expert on digital reference services, David Lankes, a chance to review the field and make some predictions for the future.

He starts with definitions, seeing “virtual reference” and “digital reference” as synonymous, and uses the commendably short definition “use of human intermediation to answer questions in a digital environment”. A nice word game follows, in which Lankes explores the different associations that people take from words and phrases (for example “light”) and how this affects the digital reference “conversation”. As an aside, it's a little sad that this section ends with an anecdote in which even the guru of digital reference is unable to make his question clear to a real digital reference librarian.

The lecture then moves to its central thesis: that “knowledge is created through conversation”: the reference interaction is a conversation between the user and the librarian leading to answering of the question. Lankes notes that while digital reference started by emulating IT help desks, library reference is a conversation rather than just finding a specific answer in a finite knowledge base. Libraries deal with an infinite range of answers, and while commercial enterprises actively discourage expensive human intermediation, the user‐librarian interaction is the core of library reference service.

Lankes then traces the development of digital reference practice, through triage and question formulation, before a concluding and thought provoking section on the future of digital reference. Lankes has come to believe that we are simply recreating the “reference desk” in the digital environment, rather than developing a new model of intermediation. He presents a participatory model of digital reference, which puts the user in control: SCAPES. In this model, rather than a one‐to‐one transaction with a librarian, a user can involve friends, databases, etc. in their query. There is a back to the future flavour to the example, which Lankes uses to illustrate the SCAPES concept, which is remarkably reminiscent of the iconic Memex of Vanevar Bush.

The lecture makes extensive use of online transcripts to illustrate points: this of course is why digital reference is such a fruitful area of research. In exact opposition to face‐to‐face reference where there is little permanent recording, transaction data is easily gathered in digital reference.

Despite the 2009 publication date, references only go to 2007, so some recent trends are not noted, for example the (possibly misguided) enthusiasm for reference services in Second Life.

A catch of the dual online/print publication is that at one point the text refers to colour in a diagram of AskERIC citation patterns – “note the broad orange and dark blue bands”. This is very clear in the coloured PDF version, but meaningless in the black and white hard copy version.

Despite these small quibbles, New Concepts in Digital Reference achieves its purpose of summarising the state of digital reference (and indeed reference service in general) in a brief and digestible format, and is a valuable reading for professionals wanting to keep abreast of the field, or for library education courses.