Joe Janes
Reference 2.0
Very nice…at Internet Librarian, but not using slides.
He’s pimping: ischool.washington.edu
New session at ALA: take everyone who longs for the “good ole days” and wants the National Union Catalog, lock the doors, and send them away. Think of the jobs then available!
Ready reference might be over.
“An academic is the sort of person who would face the Apocalypse with a historical overview”
1876: people can’t find the information they need. 2007: people can’t find the information they need.
First libraries to offer reference: special libraries, then public, lastly reference. No reference desk in academic libraries before 1910.
Reference is designed for a world with lots of information that is unfindable. That isn’t today…today we have lots of information that is FINDABLE.
Going to be an ever more digital world, and it is worth assuming that everything will be digital.
Lots of ways to get at information, at every level you can imagine.
We are trained to find wholes…we are going to increasingly find parts.
“If you aren’t editing Wikipedia articles, keep your mouth shut.”
Provide services to the kind of people who want your service.
“Get out of the freaking library.”
Be somewhere and everywhere.
Libraries have to provide space: meeting space, study rooms, etc.
Somewhere and everywhere, in and out, wholes and parts, more and better.
A Modest Proposal: For the people who dive deep, for the people who care: That’s when we do “real” reference.
For now, print is our secret weapon.
Weed those reference collections, put them in the ciculating collection.
For quick reference, concentrate on moving them forward.
For the people who are not information users, leave them alone.
3 replies on “Joe Janes Keynote, IL2007”
[…] Librarian conference, which recently wrapped up in California. Of specific interest to me were notes on the lecture given by Joe Janes of University of Washington, who has written much (that I admire) on this subject. His lecture […]
[…] Dmitri Roussinov has an excellent article on the state of the art in question-answering systems that respond to natural-language queries in his “Beyond Keywords: Automated Question Answering on the Web” in the September issue of Communications of the ACM. The article moves beyond the typical “closed domain” (or “fixed corpus”) QA systems tested in TREC competitions to consider automated open domain (or “open corpus”) QA systems, most of which are still in research prototype stages. Roussinov concludes that open domain QA systems need to address the following technical challenges: scalability, credibility, and usability, and that the next ten years will see these challenges solved. So does this mean the end of mediated online “ready reference” in libraries, as Joe Janes has already remarked in another context? […]
[…] about this for five years at least, based on these notes from his Internet Librarian keynote in 2007. I’m pretty sure I heard him say this sometime before 2007, but this is the earliest date I […]