Virtual Reference
Source: The New York Times
“Ready With Answers Around the Clock”
A NY Times article on 24×7 virtual reference services. The article mentions the Cleveland Public Library’s KnowItNow24×7 service, Q and A NJ, from the New Jersey Library Network and AskNow from the Metropolitan Cooperative Library System in California. 24/7 Reference and LSSI are also mentioned in the article. Kevin Starr, California’s state librarian is quoted in the article. Two small issues with the article. Number one is the sentence, “Increasingly, librarians, fearing irrelevancy in the age of Google, are chasing their patrons in cyberspace, and around the clock.” Yes, it’s another in the never-ending string of articles that makes it seem the entire profession is on the decline because of the WWW and one search engine in particular, Google. As noted on this weblog over and over again, Google is a wonderful and important tool, not THE solution. We must market not only the services, databases, books, etc. that we provide but also the many skills we offer the public.
Issue two is the sentence, “What’s more, public libraries can use their subscriptions, already paid for by the public through taxes, to gain entry to news and information databases whose owners have recently shifted to charging Web access fees.” These proprietary databases have always charged fees. For quite a few years libraries have provided access to these products via CD-ROM and online. What’s relatively new is that many public libraries are now making these databases remotely accessible to the public.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 29th, 2002 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.