Collaboration As the Norm in Reference Work

Jeffrey Pomerantz

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The stereotype of the reference transaction is more or less unchanged since Samuel Swett Green’s day, as involving precisely one librarian and one user. There are many common situations in which the reference transaction is not a one-to-one interaction, and this article will explore those situations. Additionally, this article argues that as network technology is increasingly utilized in reference work, situations in which the reference transaction is not a one-to-one interaction are becoming more common. Indeed, this article argues that as network technology is increasingly utilized in reference work, reference work will become fundamentally a collaborative effort, to the benefit of both individual reference services and reference work in general.

Our conception of the stereotypical reference transaction comes to us more or less unchanged since Samuel Swett Green’s day, as involving precisely one librarian and one user. There are many common situations in which the reference transaction is not a one-to-one interaction, and this article will explore those situations. Additionally, this article argues that as network technology is increasingly utilized in reference work, situations in which the reference transaction is not a one-to-one interaction are becoming more common. Indeed, this article argues that as network technology is increasingly utilized in reference work, reference work will become fundamentally a collaborative effort, to the benefit of both individual reference services and reference work in general.

Another seminal author on the topic of library reference, Taylor, adopts Green’s implicit model of the reference transaction being a one-to-one interaction.² Taylor’s concern was not to make a case for interaction between librarian and user, as Green’s was; rather, Taylor’s concern was to elucidate the steps that librarians must lead the user through during this interaction. As with Green, however, Taylor implicitly assumes that there is one and only one librarian and user in this interaction.

The major textbooks on reference work similarly treat the reference transaction as a one-to-one interaction.³ On the one hand, it is perfectly reasonable that textbooks would take this approach, since one-to-one interaction is the simplest model of interpersonal communication and is how many models of dialogic communication portray that communication.⁴ On the other hand, like many models, the model of the reference transaction as a one-to-one interaction is overly simplistic. There are many common situations in which the reference transaction is not a one-to-one interaction, and this article will explore those situations. Additionally, as network technology is increasingly utilized in reference work, situations in which the reference transaction is not a one-to-one interaction are becoming more common. Indeed, this article argues that as network technology is increasingly utilized in reference work, reference work will become fundamentally a collaborative effort.

Reference Work Has Always Been Collaborative

Tyckoson discusses the two historically predominant models of reference service: the model in which the librarian provides an answer to the user’s question, and the model in which the librarian teaches the user to use the library and to answer her own questions.⁵ Regardless of which model a library or a librarian practices, however, it is necessary for the librarian and the user to collaborate.

The reference transaction is a collaborative effort between the librarian and the user, in the sense that all interpersonal communication is a collaborative effort between the participants in a communication process. The field of communication studies known as discourse analysis is based on what Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs refer to as the “conversational model” of communication.⁶ According to this model, both individuals involved in a conversation are active participants in constructing meaning in the context of the conversation. Clark and Schaefer build on this idea of mutual construction of meaning, and propose what they refer to as a contribution. A contribution is a combination of a speech act–that is, the utterance of some meaningful content–and the acceptance of that content. This acceptance occurs when “the speaker and addressees mutually believe that the addressees have understood what the speaker meant.”⁷ (This situation is summed up most artfully by the character of Prince Geoffrey in the 1968 film The Lion in Winter, when he states that: “I know. You know I know. I know you know I know. We know Henry knows, and Henry knows we know it.”) When that mutual acceptance of the speaker’s meaning is accomplished, the original speech act achieves the status of “common ground” between the speaker and the addressee, for the purposes of the conversation.

The reference transaction is not, however, an ordinary conversation. The conversation that is the reference transaction is complicated by the fact that the participants are not simply exchanging statements; rather, one of the participants is asking a question of the other. Further, the questioner may be asking a question on a topic about which he may know little or nothing. Belkin, Oddy, and Brooks refer to this as an “anomalous state of knowledge,” and claim that “in general, the user is unable to specify precisely what is needed to resolve that anomaly.”⁸ What sets the reference transaction apart from an ordinary conversation is that the participants attempt to achieve common ground on a topic about which neither may possess any knowledge. In a way, it is amazing that common ground is ever achieved in reference transactions; it is for this reason that Lynch refers to the reference transaction as a process of “mind-reading.”⁹ But this mind reading does occur, and it is through the process of mutual construction of meaning that it is able to occur. It is because the reference transaction is a conversation, and conversations are collaborative efforts between the participants, that the reference transaction is able to succeed in resolving the user’s anomalous state of knowledge, or in providing the user with the knowledge to resolve it herself.

While the conversation that is the reference transaction is a collaborative effort between the librarian and the user, there may also be a conversation that leads up to the reference transaction. This is the case when the user in the reference transaction is acting as an agent for another. Gross refers to a reference question of this type as an “imposed query,” which is a reference question that is “set in motion when a person gives a question to someone else to resolve.” ¹⁰ As Gross points out, much of reference work is predicated on the assumption that through conversation, the librarian can elicit information about the user’s situation and the context of the question, and thereby arrive at an understanding of the question. This situation and context is, however, not present for a user who is acting as an agent. On the other hand, in order for the agent to be in possession of the question in the first place, and for the principal to be comfortable with the agent representing her to a reference service, the principal and the agent must presumably have a conversation in order for the former to convey to the latter her information need. Although this conversation is most likely hidden from the librarian (because it takes place prior to the reference transaction), it must take place in order for the principal and the agent to have arrived at common ground sufficient for the agent to operate.

Regardless of whether its purpose is question answering or instruction, the reference transaction is fundamentally a collaborative effort. Collaboration necessarily occurs between the librarian and the user, and may also occur between a principal and an agent. The remainder of this article, however, will focus on collaborations on the other side of the reference transaction: between librarians, and between reference services.

Collaboration at the Desk

Perhaps the most familiar form of collaboration between librarians in reference work is also one of the simplest: the referral. Childers draws a distinction between “steering,” or providing directions for the user to another service, and “referring,” or making contact with that other service for the user.¹¹ In both cases, a librarian directs the user to another librarian or reference service, and collectively the librarians at these different services answer the user’s question. In the case of Childers’s steering, the librarians may never directly collaborate with one another about the user’s question; they may never meet or even know that each other exists except in the most abstract way. Indeed, in such a case, the referring librarian may never even know if the user contacts the referred-to service. Thus, a steered referral is a collaborative effort, but only barely: it is collaborative in the sense that multiple librarians are part of a virtual team that works on answering a question, though that team is connected in that task only by the user. A referred referral, then, according to Childers, is one in which the librarians actually do directly collaborate with one another on the user’s question.

Hawley takes a different approach to categorizing types of referrals, drawing a distinction between an “intra-library” referral, where the user is referred to another librarian within the same library, and an “extra-library” referral, where the user is referred to another library altogether.¹² In an intra-library referral, it can probably be assumed that the referring and the referred-to librarians at least know each other, and it allows for the possibility that they will actively collaborate in answering the user’s question. This is probably the simplest model of true collaboration in reference work, when the librarians are physically collocated, and collaborate in person. Reasons for this type of collaboration may vary: one librarian may have expertise that the other does not have, or one librarian may simply be stumped and two heads are better than one. This form of collaboration is a conversation in the sense discussed above, only instead of being between a librarian and a user, it is between two librarians.¹³ The user is thus in the position of being the user of the artifacts of the conversation–that is, the common ground agreed upon by the librarians participating in the conversation. This common ground will hopefully include an answer to the user’s questions. In an extra-library referral, on the other hand, the user may be either steered or referred: that is, the librarian may simply tell the user to go to another service (with contact information in hand, one hopes), or the librarian may make contact with that other service for the user.

The universe of possibilities for interaction between librarians in referrals is pretty much exhausted by the situations described above: collaboration in person, a referral made to a colleague within the library, and a referral made to another library or service. In the case of a referral, the universe of possibilities is that the burden is on the librarian or on the user to contact that other service. It was only after the adoption of the telephone at the reference desk, however, that it was feasible for the librarian to contact the referred-to service. Most of the literature on providing reference service by telephone discusses the telephone as a tool for the provision of reference service.¹⁴ This literature treats the reference transaction as a collaborative effort between the librarian and the user, as discussed above. Very little of this literature mentions the telephone as a tool for contacting other librarians or reference services, though this is a very obvious use of the telephone. Indeed, Janes, in a 2003 Luminary Lecture at the Library of Congress, stated that his mother, who was herself a reference librarian, always said that “her favorite reference tool was the telephone.”¹⁵ It seems unlikely that Mrs. Janes is alone in this. Prior to the adoption of the telephone as a reference tool, however, extra-library referrals could only be steered–it would have been impossible for the librarian to make contact with another library or service without leaving the desk.

In this same lecture, Janes also mentions the example of an art question being submitted to the Internet Public Library (IPL). In this case, Janes states, the question might be forwarded to the Ask Joan of Art service, because a subject specialist in art would likely be able to provide a better answer than a subject generalist could. But, Janes points out, in this situation it would be up to the librarian to know that Ask Joan of Art is the best service to provide an answer to the user. A reference service is inevitably going to receive questions that it cannot answer, and for which the best alternative service for answering those questions is unclear. There are books that attempt to fill this
niche by providing answers to unusual questions, such as The Book of Answers by the New York Public Library, and the many books by Feldman.¹⁶ Even armed with such books, however, it is still up to the librarian to know that an answer may be found in one of those books. And if an answer cannot be found in such a book, what is a librarian to do? Or, more to the point, what was a librarian to do in the days before Google?

Collaboration Forums

In the situation where a librarian does not know where to find an answer, and also does not know to where to refer the user, the best option may be to send out a message in a bottle, as it were. The column, titled The Exchange, which appeared in RQ from 1965 through its entire run, and subsequently in Reference and User Services Quarterly (RUSQ) through 1999, fulfilled this function. The archives of The Exchange are now available online to members of the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA). As a forum for the exchange of “tricky questions, notes on unusual information sources, and general comments concerning reference problems and their solutions,” The Exchange allowed librarians to seek input from other librarians whom they may not even have known.¹⁷ The Exchange effectively allowed librarians to collaborate with the whole world (or at least the whole RQ- and RUSQ-reading world) on answering reference questions.

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