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THE INTERNET MAY BE REVOLUTIONIZING REFERENCE WORK, AS MARY ROSS ARGUES, BUT TRADITIONAL SOURCES STILL PREVAIL, SAYS JOHN LAWRENCE.
Reference librarians may not be ready to abandon books, but the Internet has tranformed the way reference work is being done and has become a source unparalleled in the history of libraries-or the world, for that matter.
American Libraries invited John Lawrence, reference librarian at the Swem Library at the College of William and Mary in Virginia and chair of the ALA/RUSA Reference Sources Committee (see p. 64-72), and Mary Ross, training and development librarian at Seattle Public Library, to debate the impact of the Internet on book-based reference service in a March 30 "Conference Call." The conversation has been edited for clarity and length. AL: Is the availability of information on the Internet making certain traditional reference sources obsolete? LAWRENCE Certainly I think it has changed things. But some of the best tools that are out there on the Web simply reflect traditional reference products, and some kinds of tools like encyclopedias, particularly specialized encyclopedias, are still not matched in terms of what's being published or presented, at least at this point, on the Web. ROSS I've been working in public libraries for over 20 years, and I've yet to find users who are "traditional" in the kinds of questions they ask and in the ways they ask them. I'd like to know where these users are, whose question exactly matches the way the data is presented in reference books. For our users, our print reference collections are not sacred cows. In the past, information clearly was mainly textual, but with this evolving information technology, we can't think any longer about information as words on a page. LAWRENCE I do see that categories of materials, particularly reference tools like encyclopedias, statistical resources, have repetitive types of use for categories of users. Of course, I'm in an academic situation and I need these sort of introductory tools for people who are new to their field, and specialized encyclopedias allow that sort of access. And I do, on a regular basis, see the same kind of needs, over and over again. AL: Does some of what we're talking about here depend on what kind of librarian...