Thanks, Steve, for directing us to Diane Zabel's pieces on ref trends.

A person can respond to these figures in any number of ways, of course.
Zabel's responses are a bit evasive, but she's absolutely right to point
out that by "ref transaction" we no longer necessarily mean the same
thing we once did, and we need to take into account the new and
different ways that patrons interact with library staff, ways that ARL
statistics don't necessarily capture.

ARL's observation, on the other hand, that "the overall numbers are
still substantial," is simply fatuous.  It would be a good response if
the salient question were "Are we still helping a lot of patrons at the
Ref Desk?"  But that's not the issue.  The salient question is "What do
we need to be preparing for?", and the way to answer that question is
not by looking happily at today's high numbers, but by looking at where
today's numbers sit on a slope that begins in 1998 (or earlier).

I'm not sure we're taking seriously enough the fact that if the numbers
continue to move in the current direction, at the current rate, they'll
have hit zero before another six years go by.  If the numbers hit zero
because patrons have abandoned traditional reference transactions and
replaced them with staff consultations of a type not captured by ARL
statistics, then that will be wonderful.  But I'm not sure it's in our
best interest to assume that that's what's going to happen.  I think we
need to take seriously the possibility -- even, dare I say it, the
probability -- that our patrons are simply bypassing us altogether.
That doesn't have to spell disaster for libraries, but it ought to lead
us to seriously rethink the way we do certain things.

----
Rick Anderson
Dir. of Resource Acquisition
University of Nevada, Reno Libraries
(775) 784-6500 x273
rickand@unr.edu