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At the 2011 Midwinter Meeting of the American Library Association, the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) Board voted unanimously to approve the move of the division’s professional journal, Reference & User Services Quarterly (RUSQ), to a solely online publication beginning in fall 2011. This vote was taken after a recommendation for the move was made by a taskforce assigned to examine the issue. In the editor’s column of this issue, Diane Zabel explains the specifics of the move and how the process will work for RUSA members.

I would like to talk briefly here about how this move fits into the broader picture for RUSA as we head into the second decade of the twenty-first century. One of the concerns of any professional organization is maintaining the fiscal health of the organization. The move from print to online is a major step in this direction for RUSA. The savings that we realize from the move will allow RUSA to balance our budget without spending our endowment funds. As we begin a new round of strategic planning in 2011–12, these additional funds will allow RUSA more flexibility in pursuing member-driven initiatives.

RUSA has a well-deserved reputation for leading the profession in the areas of reference and readers’ advisory work and collection development. Our members are able to take advantage of a wide range of opportunities as part of their membership in RUSA. The networking, professional development, leadership training, book and media awards, committee service, and much more enhances both the library profession and the professional lives of RUSA members. These opportunities add value to RUSA membership. While RUSA continues to value the opportunities to meet face to face, it is also clear that we need to extend our member opportunities beyond Midwinter and Annual meetings. Offering professional development opportunities, online classes, and webinars has been an important piece of this expansion of RUSA’s mission. RUSQ has been our flagship publication for a half century. Over that time, the journal’s blend of theory and practice has been a model for the profession and a valued tool for librarians. The move to an all online publication will allow RUSA to sustain that model in the coming years as well as to expand the role of RUSQ in the future.

I would like to thank editor Diane Zabel and the members of the RUSQ taskforce that produced the recommendations for this change. This move sets RUSQ and RUSA on the path to a successful future.

Barry Trott, 2010–11 President of the Reference and User Services Association, is Adult Services Director, Williamsburg Regional Library, 7770 Croaker Rd., Williamsburg, VA 23188; e-mail: btrott@wrl.org.

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In this, my final column as RUSA President, I am taking some time to reflect on my career as a reference librarian. I guess you could say that I am probably in the declining years of my career. I am over fifty and have been a reference librarian since 1980—you do the math. So I wanted to reflect on some very basic questions, such as why did I became a reference librarian? what or who have been my greatest influences? and of course, what is the future of reference?

The Most Frequently Asked Questions—Redux

I have worked in the same library for twenty-seven years. When I first started, I told my students in my classes that there were three questions asked most frequently in the library. So, to relieve their suspense, I would just tell them the answers.

1. Where is the pencil sharpener? (At the circulation desk.)
2. Where is the photocopier, and how much do the copies cost? (In the front lobby, and 5 cents.)
3. Where are the restrooms? (Go downstairs, turn left and left again.)

Today, my most frequent questions are almost the same. The pencil sharpener question has been replaced by users needing assistance with printers. I still get asked about the photocopier costs, but the answer is more complicated: currently 15 cents after purchasing a copy card (40 cents) with a single dollar bill. The bathroom question and answer remains the same. After reading Lorraine J. Pellack’s recent RUSQ editorial, “First Impressions and Rethinking Restroom Questions,” and the comments that her article generated on the RUSQ website I agree that a polite, friendly, and quick response to this question is essential to forming positive impressions of your services.¹

Why I Became a Librarian

I became a librarian because I loved solitary studying in libraries while a college student. The library, as a place, was very comforting to me. As a child, I would go to the Norwalk Public Library—a Carnegie library—which still stands on Main Street in this Victorian town in Ohio. The library was right next to the A&P grocery store, so when we went for our weekly groceries on Friday evening, we also picked up new books. As I got older, I could easily ride my bike to the library. Then as a teen, when it was no longer socially acceptable to be seen riding a bike downtown, it was not too far to walk. Libraries were a familiar, comfortable, and safe place with so many interesting books! I could be easily attracted by different areas of the library, just as today I am so fascinated by searching the Web.

As an undergraduate at Eastern Kentucky University, I practically lived in the library. I was majoring in history, political science, and education, all areas where you had to write many papers. I went to the library for instruction classes, but I rarely asked reference librarians for help. In grad school, as a political science student at Miami University, I got my own carrel and set up shop. It was easy to live in that library because they had great vending machines in the basement where I would go to socialize, snack, and get right back to work. They had long hours too! As a grad student, I did consult the reference librarians, who were always friendly and helpful. I do not ever remember leaving the reference desk without knowing where I was going next. I was a happy and satisfied user.

Once I made my decision not to pursue a PhD in political science, I considered my options, and becoming a librarian just made so much sense. I loved to search for information and I loved being in libraries. So off to library school I went.

The Challenges of Being a Library School Student

Once I went to library school at Kent State, I also lived in the library; it was a satisfying habit by then. They too gave me a carrel and I sought out reference librarians for assistance. They were mostly friendly. Do you remember, however, the way you felt as a library school student asking questions of reference librarians when you were taking your first reference courses? You think that because you are going to be a librarian, maybe you should not ask questions of the real librarians? And when you do ask questions, you sometimes perceive that the librarians might just be a little testy about answering your questions because, after all, you are a library school student and shouldn’t you already know how to answer your own questions? Why is there always that tension between library school students and reference librarians? I was recently asked this very question from a brand new library school student during a presentation at the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. I told the future librarian the following: “Please do ask the librarians as many questions as you can and on every occasion that you need to!” I believe that not only does this exchange provide the student with direction, but it also lets them observe the librarians’ differing styles and approaches to discovering information. The reference transaction is a teaching tool, especially for those who will be doing the answering in the future.

On the Importance of Catalogers

I became a reference librarian because there was no other job I wanted more in the field. Being a cataloger was a contender, however. Today I still believe that you cannot be a good reference librarian without understanding the basic tenets of cataloging. I have a great deal of respect for catalogers. Once, while teaching a reference class in a library school, I was horrified to learn that cataloging was no longer a basic requirement. I proceeded to give my students a basic lecture on cataloging, subject headings, and different classification systems. They were even unfamiliar with the bright red Library of Congress Subject Headings, a tool I have always cherished. Today, even though we have cloud tags and metadata, you still must be able to tell users how to actually find a book on the shelf or the Web. I, for one, am not yet ready to abandon classification systems.

Who Have Been My Greatest Influences As a Reference Librarian?

The Early Years

I suppose some of my first influences and perceptions about librarians came as a small child. I visited the library often and read many books, even getting a prize for reading the most books over the summer between fifth and sixth grade. The children’s librarian, Carol Newton, was very tall, had a big smile, an extra loud laugh, and showed me the world of books. In junior high, I was elected the vice president of the library club and worked in the library. The librarian, Myra Carpenter, was caring, always very clever, and a wonderful inspiration. She could shush with the best. We kept in touch, and after library school she lent me copies of American Libraries to aid in my first job search.

We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.—Bill Gates, The Road Ahead, 1996

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Bill Gates could probably have used even more extreme adverbs. That is, we vastly underestimate the change that will occur in ten years. Think of 1999 and compare it to today.

Think of webinars, going digital, investment bubbles, e-readers, chat reference, handheld computers, cloud computing, Twitter, Facebook, Google Books, Flickr, social networking, and Library 2.0.

This is the second column examining the statements of concerns from 105 candidates who have run for an elected position in RUSA in the past three years (2007–9). The method is described in the following note.¹ In the Winter 2009 RUSQ, I examined issues related to association participation. In this column I analyze the candidates’ statements to determine implications for our strategic planning process.

I know, strategic planning is not always interesting, but it is necessary and should act as a roadmap for our future. Sometimes it’s nice to see where we are headed, and I hope to make it fun, or at the very least educational! I hope you will find this discussion interesting because it is from the membership’s perspective (RUSA candidates who have run for office). I must again remind you that when the candidates created their statements for election, they did not write them for the purpose of this analysis. The idea to use them in RUSA’s strategic planning process came later.

In September 2009, leaders from ALA’s executive board, divisions, round tables, and senior staff met for a strategic planning retreat in Itasca, Illinois. This meeting was the first step in the process of developing ALA’s next strategic plan to guide the association over the next five years. To help inform our members, ALA created an environmental scan containing documents on major issues and trends affecting libraries, posting it on ALA Connect (http://connect.ala. org/2015scan). The environmental scan includes documents on these topics:

• academic libraries
• cultural environment
• economic environment
• educational environment
• media environment
• nonprofits and associations
• political environment
• public libraries
• school libraries
• societal environment
• special and government libraries
• technological environment
• the American Library Association

The document that came out of the Itasca planning retreat identified five goal areas to guide the planning process:

• advocacy and public policy
• building the profession
• transforming libraries
• member engagement
• organizational excellence

The planning document was reviewed and refined at the 2009 ALA Executive Board Fall Meeting in Chicago. The revised plan was disseminated before the 2010 ALA Midwinter Meeting for further member review. The intent is for the plan to go into effect after ALA Council approval at the Annual Conference in Washington, DC, in June 2010.

Each October, all of ALA’s division leadership and the ALA executive board gather in Chicago to discuss both division- and ALA–wide issues. RUSA’s executive committee includes the “Three P’s” (RUSA’s current, past and future presidents), our ALA councilor, and the RUSA board secretary. The 2009 committee was Susan J. Beck, Neal Wyatt, Barry Trott, Kathleen Kern, and Theresa Mudrock. The RUSA committee meets in the morning to discuss RUSA issues, and then all the ALA leaders come together in the afternoon to discuss a common issue. This year we contributed to the development of ALA’s next strategic plan.

The following morning, the RUSA executive committee met again to review our current strategic plan and establish new strategies for this year. In preparation for the Fall Leadership Meeting, I analyzed the candidate statements to see if they could help inform our discussions (as well as develop it for this column).

What Are Our Challenges?

What do the candidates believe to be the most important issues facing our profession today? What are our concerns? How can we transform our challenges into opportunities and frame them into strategic goals and objectives? One candidate defined his expectations and hopes for RUSA this way:

We depend upon the support of ALA and RUSA to find solutions and make involvement in the profession both essential and possible.

Although there were many issues identified by the candidates, these following were mentioned most often:

• membership
• user services
• professional development
• technology
• networking
• relevancy
• economy

As in the previous article, I will briefly introduce the issue, but the candidates’ own language will be used to express each topic via a mixture of direct quotes and synthesized thoughts.

Membership

The most important question for any professional society is how to best serve the needs of its members. Officer candidates expressed a clear desire that RUSA be more responsive to member needs by gathering more user data about how members use RUSA. According to one candidate, “recruiting and inspiring a new generation of enthusiastic technically savvy yet service oriented librarians is also a top priority.” Another candidate said the following:

It is time that our professional organization uses new technologies to communicate more broadly and effectively to members; reach out and appeal to new librarians and those we wish to recruit; and give members effective means to voice their concerns, share their ideas, and give feedback to the RUSA board.

Candidates also asked how RUSA should do the following:

• ngrow a membership that is representative of all stakeholders
• build our membership
• appeal to new librarians
• invite new participation
• get more public librarians involved
• provide value to our members
• increase the visibility of RUSA in the profession and society at large
• help recruit new members to specialize in history librarianship
• explore whether RUSA should have other subject sections

One candidate said that RUSA must “develop an agenda that actively promotes communication of information highlighting innovative practices of our professionals.”

Virtual participation is an important topic to both ALA and RUSA members. Our candidates asked how RUSA should do the following:

• Allow for all members to participate in the division? n Involve and connect virtually with members that often cannot attend conferences?
• Create online opportunities and venues that can be used to highlight successful library programs and avenues for discussion and idea sharing, which is necessary for members that are unable to attend conferences? Perhaps we should even share information about failures and mistakes so that others can avoid making the same ones.

Organizational Communication

Improving communication with and to our members is imperative to the future of RUSA. Just as important is how we seek and facilitate communication from our members. Here are some candidates’ thoughts on this issue:

• Identify the best means to communicate and promote our division’s activities to reach existing, new, and potential members.
• How can we give members effective means to voice their concerns, share their ideas, and give feedback to the RUSA board?
• What new technologies can we use to communicate more broadly and effectively to members?
• Enhance our efforts to communicate with and beyond our membership.

Technology

How do we librarians use technology? How can technology make our work easier? How do our users adapt to new technologies? How can we help our users adapt? How can we best use technology to facilitate RUSA’s work? One candidate said, “We need to continue to find innovative ways to meet the needs of our patrons and potential users. We need to seek out the trends and technologies that advance our profession.” Another said “A key issue of professional concern to me is meeting the challenge of technological change while maintaining our traditional core values of library service, including equity of access to information.”

Other candidates expressed these opinions:

• Take advantage of new technologies and strategies that allow us to deliver our services and share our resources more effectively.
• Educating public services staff in changes in information technology.
• We in reference and user services know the power of technology to assist us in meeting users’ information needs.

User Services

We need more data about our library users. What kinds of services do they need? What kinds of collections? How much instruction and what kind? Are our services and tools too complex? Have we adapted effectively to our users’ apparent desire for self-service?

Once we understand our users’ needs we, in turn, have to evaluate our services, collections, and programs to determine what changes we need to make to provide the best quality services and collections we can offer.

These were some of the most pressing concerns expressed by the candidates about responding to user’s needs.

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For many of us reference librarians, one of the greatest rewards we get from what we do is the immediate and direct feedback that we receive from our users. Because we help people, we are on the receiving end of their gratitude when we are able to give them what they want. We get a strong feeling of achievement and pride in being able to meet user needs and we get satisfaction from the “feel good” nature of reference service. As reference librarians, we may have to put up with inadequate staffing, insufficient resources, mechanical failures, and evening and weekend shifts, but the feedback that we get from our users often makes up for those annoyances.

No other branch of librarianship enjoys this same reward. Circulation staff also interact daily with the public, but too often that interaction is adversarial in nature, centering on overdue fines and lost books. Technical services and systems staff build the tools that we use when helping patrons, but they do not receive much feedback about that work. Rarely does the public—or even other library staff—acknowledge the hard work that is done in those areas. “Wow—you really nailed that subject heading!” or “What a great author entry!” are not phrases often heard in the halls of the library. Similarly, praise for Web design, authority control, open URL linking, metasearch configuration, and OPAC maintenance is rare. Although users are grateful for all of these features, they do not have the same real-time interaction with their creators that they have with reference librarians. We reference librarians are seen as the good guys of the library, riding in on a white horse, providing the book or the Web site that will save the day for our users. The positive reinforcement that we get from that image is why many of us became reference librarians in the first place.

Having been a reference librarian for three decades (as of summer 2008), I realize that I have helped thousands of patrons over the past thirty years. By my rather crude and conservative estimate (five reference transactions per hour, ten hours per week, forty weeks of the year [not counting time for vacation, conferences, etc.], for thirty years), I have participated in somewhere between sixty and seventy thousand reference transactions. That’s a lot of people.

In those thousands and thousands of transactions, some stand out in my mind. Doubtless you have had a similar experience. Whether you have been a reference librarian for five months or fifty years, you will have experienced some transactions that are simply more memorable than others. I would like to share four real reference transactions that I experienced as a reference librarian. Your mileage may vary, but each of you has probably had experiences similar to those that I am about to mention. The key to this group of stories is not the subject being searched, the methodology used to find the answer, or even the technology involved (which was pretty much nonexistent in these examples), but in how the patrons reacted to what I did. As you read each of these scenarios, think about similar experiences from your own reference work.

1. Why is Germany in Europe? Yes, someone really asked me this question. One reason that I remember it is because it was one of the very first questions that I was ever asked, way back before I even became an official, degree-carrying reference librarian. It was 1977 or 1978, and I was working as a graduate reference assistant at the University of Illinois. An undergraduate student came to the reference desk and asked this question. I immediately thought of a cute, clever, and accurate response, which I proceeded to tell her: “Because our side won World War II, which means that Europe is not in Germany.”

Fortunately, she did not dismiss me for what I was: a smartass, overconfident graduate student. When I asked her for more information, I found out what she really wanted. It turns out that she misspoke when she said Germany (she was studying German history) and wanted to know why Russia (then the Soviet Union) was considered to be a European country. After all, the greater land mass of Russia is in Asia, so shouldn’t we call it an Asian country? What cultural biases have led us to classify Russia as part of Europe instead of Asia? And while we are at it, why are Europe and Asia even considered two separate continents, since they are joined together by the Ural mountains? These complex questions were all buried in her initial question, which I had trivialized.

Needless to say, Mr. Smartass was humbled by the experience. Searches for books (no Web sites to search back in the 1970s!) on geographic naming standards, Russian history and culture, and even continental drift all factored into the search for an answer. This experience taught me two important lessons: that cute and clever was not the appropriate response, and that questions are often much more complex than they seem. In the end, she was somewhat satisfied with the transaction, even though we never really found an answer. Although I still liked my initial response, I knew that it did not help solve the problem.

2. This example occurred about a decade later. A man came to the desk and wanted help with his family history. He had a photocopy of a document in German that referred to a specific town or village. He wanted to find out where that village was located and had so far been unsuccessful. Quick checks of atlases and gazetteers proved that he was right—the place name that he had was not listed. He was in a hurry and I offered to keep looking and call him when I found something.

Subsequent searching, consultation with a librarian who read and spoke German, work in the map collection, and some historical geographic sources revealed the answer. This town was near the German/Polish border and had changed nationalities several times over the years. The name that the patron had was the old German name (written in Old German script), whereas modern maps used the Polish name. In addition, the village had since been subsumed by the growth of a nearby city. Once we knew where it was, we found an old map that showed the town with the name in German and a current map that showed it in Polish. I was very proud that I was able to use my reference skills—and get the appropriate help—to figure out the answer.

A few days later, the patron came back. I showed him the map and started to explain the reason why we could not easily find his town. He took a quick look at the map, said “thanks,” and was out the door. Three hours of research resulted in less than three seconds of use. I was stunned by how little the patron cared about the effort that was made on his query and at how little he seemed to really care about the answer. The lesson that I learned from this question was that a strong effort on my part did not always lead to high satisfaction on the patron’s part.

3. This example involved a young man in his late twenties or early thirties who was starting his own business. He was interested in information on writing business plans, getting funding, government regulations, and everything else that he needed to start up his company. Because he had a day job, he only came to the library at night and he happened to come in on whatever evening shift I was working at the time. We worked together over a period of about a year and developed the rapport that makes a great partnership. Little by little, I helped him find the information he needed to start his company. What was interesting about this prolonged transaction was the product that he was going to produce, which was liquor. But this was not just any liquor. He wanted to produce a high-end product and had a brilliant marketing scheme. Since the state of Vermont always seemed to be associated with quality, wholesomeness, and purity (at least to New Yorkers, where I was working at the time), he was creating “made in Vermont” liquors. His company actually got off the ground, and he sold several different types of liquor, including a maple-based vodka. I don’t know if it is still in business, but it was rewarding to see his plan grow from idea to product.

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I was born on November 4. I am an election baby. I was born on a Wednesday, but in the year I was born, there was not a U.S. general election. Those only happen on the Tuesday after the first Monday of November from November 2 through November 8 in even-numbered years.¹ I was born in an odd year. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the U.S. general election has fallen on my birthday twice already. I cannot think of elections without thinking of my birthday.

As a child, one form of free and educational entertainment in which my family engaged, when my birthday was on election day, was watching the election returns come in at the Huron County (Ohio) Courthouse. We did this after a celebratory birthday dinner at Kentucky Fried Chicken. The courthouse is a majestic building with an imposing bell tower that sits right in the center of downtown Norwalk, Ohio. You can see for yourself in Wikipedia or just Google it to look at other courthouse images.² We climbed the imposing steps to the second floor to watch the flurry of activity surrounding the elections. It was all very exciting—all this fuss just for my birthday. I remember the election board officials handed out small patriotic tokens like Ohio flags to children and the party officials gave out leftover buttons and rulers with their party’s campaign slogans. I still have a wooden ruler from the 1960 election. I also seem to remember donuts—and cider—even though I really associate those with the Halloween parade a few days before. Maybe they were just leftover, too.

When I was young, I wanted to be a senator. Instead, I am proud to say I became the president of RUSA. There was an election involved. I have both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in political science—all because I was born in the first week of November. It’s funny how when you were born affects who you become. I am a Scorpio. According to one astrological website, “the curiosity of Scorpios is immeasurable, which may be why they are such adept investigators. These folks love to probe and know how to get to the bottom of things.”³

Ah, so this is why I became a reference librarian. It also is probably why it takes me so long to write these columns— curiosity gets the best of me and the Web provides so many fascinating distractions. Case in point: For this editorial, I actually looked up the biography of the architect of the Huron County Courthouse, Vernon Redding, to discover that he also built a number of Carnegie Libraries in Ohio.⁴ I digress.

So, as you can see, elections and voting have always been very important to me. This issue of RUSQ will come out just before the 2010 ALA elections. So I want to take this opportunity to encourage you to vote. One of the privileges and, yes, responsibilities of membership in RUSA is to vote. Effective governance of associations requires the participation of its members. Voting provides us with the opportunity to shape our association. Even if you are not able to participate on RUSA committees or attend conferences, our election is one place where you can actively participate and make a difference. Your vote does count. I can’t tell you how many elections I have seen in RUSA where elections were won or lost by just one vote, much to the amazement, incredulity, and disappointment of the candidates. In the 2009 RUSA elections, there were three very tight races. One candidate won by one vote for a memberat-large position. Two chair positions were won by less than a 3 percent margin. This illustrates that the two candidates were well matched, but it also demonstrates that each vote is important. Our electoral participation rate as a division is 23.9 percent. This is comparable to ALA’s participation rate of 23.4 percent.⁵ See table 1 to see how our members vote in each of our division’s sections.

The point is, I expect you to vote in the next election. You will select members to represent your views and opinions. You will select the leadership of RUSA and its sections. An election is one of the most important participatory events in any association, so vote and let your voice be heard. Participation is what this is all about!

I am going to quickly describe the candidate selection process in case you are unfamiliar with it. One of the first things one does as the president-elect or as a section vice-chair is to appoint the next Nominating Committee chair. This process is completed by November. The Nominating Committees recruit a slate of candidates for each open elective position. The slates are finalized at the ALA Annual Conference and the nominees submitted to the RUSA office by September 15 for the spring election. Candidates are asked to submit biographical information, including data about their education and professional positions, as well as to describe their ALA activities and accomplishments. The candidates also are asked to provide a statement about their professional concerns.

Voting in ALA elections can be time consuming and even intimidating to the new voter. I am a member of two ALA divisions, all six RUSA sections, and a roundtable, so it takes me awhile. I love the new electronic voting, which lets me go vote for one position at a time without having to complete the entire ballot when I am inevitably interrupted.

What kind of voter are you? Are you intimidated by the lengthy ALA ballots? Are you the voter who quickly zeros in on your choice, makes your selection, saves them and exits out of there as fast as you can, perhaps seldom reading the candidate’s biography and statement of concerns? Or are you the voter who simply must learn where the candidate is from, where they worked, and what committees they have served on? Do you want to discover whether you have worked with the person, or perhaps know someone who has worked with the person, or ever lived in the same state—you see what I mean? Guess which type of voter I am? Yes! I openly admit it—I love to read everything about each candidate!

You can learn a lot about a person and how they think by reading their statements. You can find out what the candidate values about our association, what they believe the association should be doing, how they think RUSA can best help meet members’ needs, and what they think are the most important benefits the association offers its members. What are the important issues facing the profession, the association, and their specialized section? What is important to the candidate? How do they perceive the needs of our specialties in our profession? What has their participation in RUSA meant to them?

For the last few years I have been selectively collecting RUSA candidate’s statements at election time, not quite knowing just what I would be doing with them, but thinking they would be interesting to analyze.⁶ So, this is the first of two columns examining the statement of concerns from 105 candidates who have run for an elected position in RUSA in the past three years (2007–09). Since 2007, 109 members have run for an elective office. These include every candidate for RUSA president, board of directors, councilor, chair, secretary, and member at large. Of the 109 candidates, 105 (96.3 percent) completed the statement of concern portion of the ballot. In the future I hope all the candidates will think that it is important to provide this information.

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As I begin my first presidential column, I believe what is upmost on everyone’s mind is the state of the economy. This recession officially began in December 2007, but according to the New York Times, it wasn’t officially declared a recession by the National Bureau of Economic Research until December 2008.¹ Unfortunately, the effects of the recession will still be felt as you read this column.

In this column I will:

• describe how librarians are helping users during the recession and why users need their libraries;
• explain the affects of the recession on RUSA and how your leadership is responding to the current economic conditions;
• show how libraries are being portrayed in the media and what professional resources the American Library Association (ALA) has created to help librarians face the increasing demands of the public;
• conclude by reviewing the importance and value of being a member of RUSA today; and
• remind you why you joined a professional organization in the first place and why it is important to stay a member.

Last fall we saw the stock market crash. Even if you did not lose a huge amount of money and you still have a house and a job, the current economic crisis affects you. Businesses are closing, including my favorite vegetarian restaurant. People have not only lost their nest eggs, many have lost their jobs and some have even lost their homes. By the time you read this article, I hope things will have turned around. I imagine you do, too.

The recession has changed our work, no matter what kind of library we work in. I work in an academic library, and I am seeing many more students searching for information about the economy. Just yesterday, I had a student who wanted to look at Texas newspapers to see what effect Texas’s budget has on the state’s economy.

How Is the Recession Affecting ALA and RUSA?

RUSA is not immune to the current economic situation. ALA is projecting a shortfall of 1.6 million dollars in the general fund, which does not include the divisions. RUSA is predicting an annual deficit as well. RUSA’s traditional funding sources—membership dues and advertising revenues—are declining. These two areas represent 71 percent of our income. According to the February 2009 membership report, our membership has fallen by 7.78 percent. Registration for preconferences at the 2010 ALA Annual Conference in Chicago was also down.

This year it also has been difficult getting volunteers for committees in RUSA’s sections. RUSA has 140 committees spread across its 6 divisions. One vice-chair told me that she had only had eight volunteers for her very large section, which has more than twenty different committees. Even the committees that have traditionally been considered plum appointments are falling short.

There is uneasiness among our members about how they will be able to fund their conference attendance, especially two times a year. They question if they will receive any library support to attend conferences or preconferences. Our vendors are scaling back on their donations, advertising, and exhibit space at conferences as they face the realities of the changing economy. While overall ALA membership is up, members are thinking twice about continuing with multiple divisions. All of these factors affect our ability to achieve our goals.

On a positive note, our continuing education offerings are growing, including registration for our online continuing education courses. We provide cost-effective means for our members to take quality coursework without traveling long distances to keep up with the current trends in our field. We now offer Genealogy 101, the Reference Interview, Business Reference 101, Readers’ Advisory 101, Marketing Basics for Libraries, and another course is in the making from our Sharing and Transforming Access to Resources Section (STARS).

How Is RUSA Responding?

RUSA leadership has been seeking member input to help us become more responsive to your needs. This year we contacted you to share your ideas on two important issues: our redesigned website (www.ala.org/rusa) and electronic committee participation.

Early in 2009 we conducted an online campaign called 14 Days to Have Your Say about how to improve the new RUSA website. We received many comments and then quickly acted on the most pressing issues. Improvements included better access to common volunteer resources, sections, and roster information.

Last spring we also asked our members to provide feedback about electronic committee participation.² Our intention is to facilitate committee work and encourage participation for those members whose financial and/or time budgets do not permit attendance at two conferences each year.

We received many comments about members’ desires to move to a more virtual participation organizational model. In response to your concerns, we have established the RUSA E-Participation Task Force to make recommendations about the best methods of moving our division from an exclusively face-to-face model of participation to a more flexible mix of face-to-face and electronic participation. The task force’s final report is due at the 2010 ALA Midwinter Meeting in Boston. If you would like to provide additional comments, please contact Celia Ross (caross@umich.edu), the task force chair.

Most members are supportive of a move to electronic participation, although many commented they would miss the face-to-face discussion of current trends and issues. Others were concerned whether available software could meet their needs and if different time zones would create problems setting up virtual meetings.

RUSA staff is trying hard to help both members and staff use new technology to become more efficient and effective. In April 2009, ALA launched ALA Connect, a resource that provides a common virtual space for committee members to share documents, survey members, and participate in chats and discussion forums to facilitate committee work and networking. These types of tools will allow our organization to become more flexible. I encourage all of our committees to try it out at http://connect.ala.org.

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It is somewhat traditional for RUSA presidents to focus their final “From the President” column on the future of RUSA and the profession. I think that the future of librarianship is, as ever, strong and exciting. In ten years we may not be doing what we are doing right now, but we have always looked for the best ways to serve our patrons, and that often means change. Our core mission—finding, organizing, accessing, and sharing information and resources—is always going to be a requirement of the world. As long as we navigate the future with our values as our compass, as long as we are open to change and can manifest that change, we will be fine.

In fact, we will be more than fine. No matter the methods of change, we will continue to buy the books that light up the world for readers, point readers to them, and share their delight. We will continue to support the researcher who one day finds the clue that leads to the cure for cancer. We will build bridges between patrons, technology, and collections and help our users explore the vast resources our predecessors helped construct. No one creates or invents anything in a vacuum. Every author, scholar, or inventor who has ever changed the world has done so through the sparks of ideas gained from a vibrant curiosity about, and engagement with, the world. Librarians are the Virgils in this process—the guides, finders, sorters, and arrangers of all that possibility. As indispensable light, we will be fine.

It is that role and mission that energizes me about RUSA’s future as well. We also can look toward a horizon that is exciting and full of potential. As we have done for decades, and as we will continue to do for decades more, we shape and guide the profession through the thousands of gifted librarians willing to lend their expertise and labor to the process. Because RUSA is dynamic and open to ideas and change, it is very hard to say what we will look like tomorrow, much less five or ten years from now. However, I think there are some areas we are thinking about today that will bear fruit in the future.

Virtual

At the 2009 Midwinter Meeting and the Annual Conference, RUSA experimented with having committees meet completely in a virtual setting. I think we will continue this trend as schedules and budgets make it more and more difficult to justify face-to-face meetings for all but the most critical of reasons. I think we are going to start asking if we can meet our needs via conference calls, videoconferences, or some yet-to-be invented online tool. Sooner rather than later, we are going to look around the room at some conference and ask ourselves if what we just did in an hour was worth the travel time and costs. When it is not, we will change our default of meeting in person to meeting virtually, and that will not only change how RUSA works, it will change who is willing to serve on committees and open RUSA to a whole new set of expert members who are currently shut out of the process because of a lack of financial support.

Content beyond Conference

As wonderful as ALA conferences are, not every RUSA member attends, and not everyone who could benefit from our content belongs to RUSA or ALA. Part of our growth as an association and our influence on our profession depends on us sharing what we know as widely as possible. To do that, we need to push our content outward. At the Midwinter Meeting and Annual Conference we made a small but important first step in this direction—we recorded events and programs and made them available to anyone who was interested. I think that, over time, this will become commonplace, and much if not all of our programming will one day be captured and archived. I look forward to the day when our content is as widely available and sought after as the TED Talks.

Sharing the Wealth

The Public Library Association (PLA) recently moved to create communities of interest instead of a formal committee structure. It will be interesting to see how these communities develop, but in terms of RUSA’s future, one thing they highlight is the need to build a broad community and share with each other what we know. RUSA already does this at the micro level with our discussion groups, programs, and preconferences, but we don’t do much on the macro level. In the future, I think that will change as how we communicate and how we meet to do our work shifts and rearranges. The shift will help RUSA serve as a vibrant clearinghouse of our shared expertise and knowledge. I look forward to the day a librarian needing to get up to speed on the newest trend in interlibrary loan can scan the Sharing and Transforming Access to Resources Section’s (STARS) contributions to our clearinghouse and find a list of the ten best articles on that trend published during the year. We know so much, and we can do so much good together, we just need to find a way to share.

Since I am writing this (thanks to the quirky schedule of RUSQ ’s quarterly deadlines) in early January, I would like to close this peek into RUSA’s crystal ball with three resolutions. Resolutions that, if we all resolve and fulfill, would go a long way in creating a future-RUSA that is dynamic, adaptive, responsive, and ready and eager to change.

Subscribe to RUSA-L

You know how the experts during New Year’s tell you to make realistic resolutions with goals that are achievable? Well, here is one you can achieve in less than a minute. If everyone in RUSA would subscribe to RUSA-L, it would give RUSA a way of talking to everyone at once. Right now, the only way we can do this is through RUSA Update or to pay for a membership-wide bulk e-mail. To create our future, it is important that we can all share with each other. RUSA-L is the best way we can send important news about the association, conferences, programs, and calls for input.

It just takes a second to subscribe: Send an e-mail to sympa@ala.org with the following subject “subscribe rusa-l firstname lastname” (replace “firstname” and “lastname” with your first and last names.) Do not put anything in the body of the message.

Post Something to the RUSA Blog

Until we think of a better way, the best place to start RUSA down the path to a vibrant clearinghouse is to post to our blog. Not only is it a resolution you could fulfill in less than thirty minutes, it is a way to share what you know with the rest of us. Post anything: a website you find useful, an article that helped you figure something out, an explanation of a new 2.0 tool and some example uses, a blog that you follow and think others would enjoy, a list of resources, your best pathfinder or booklist—anything that you think would enrich our community.

The reason RUSA is such a dynamic organization is because all of its members are engaged with the profession in vital ways. This comes out in committee meetings and discussion groups but not very often during the rest of the year because we very rarely share this kind of clearinghouse information with each other. We should resolve to change that.

To post to the RUSA blog, you must first create an account. In the upper-right corner of the RUSA Blog page, under “Welcome,” there is a link that states, “Don’t have an account? Create one here.” Click the link, choose a username, and type in your e-mail address. This creates a new blog account and gives you a username and password. E-mail Chris Cieslak (ccieslak@ala.org) your blog username and e-mail address, and he will add you to the verified authors list and send instructions on how to post.

Wash the Dishes

This is sort of insider baseball talk, born out of long conversations about what we do and do not do well. We are great cooks—we put on amazing programs, write important and useful guidelines, and hold valuable discussion groups. However, for the most part, unless you attend one of these fantastic events you would never really know they happened. This is because, while we are great cooks, we don’t like to wash the dishes. We don’t excel at following up after an event. Either we are too slow to get things posted or we never post them at all. When we do post things, it tends to be in so many different places that searchers get confused and frustrated. We need to resolve to wash the dishes, and we need to figure out just what that means.

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RUSA is an oddity. Usually institutions fall into one of two categories: Either the sum of its parts is greater than the whole, or the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Think about Congress, the UN, or a car manufacturing line. In each case, either the total institution is more important than its parts, or the parts are what make the institution shakily hold together. RUSA is in a perfect state of balance—its parts are its whole and its whole is its parts. We, as the current “it” word likes to portray, are at that happy point when everything works and innovation, creativity, and effort are in perfect sync: We are in a state of flow.

Flow is a funny thing. It is fragile; a tiny tilt right or left and it is lost. It is elusive; go looking for it and you will never find it. But once attained, it is self-generating. The kind of effort and outcome that is achieved through flow keeps feeding back into the flow state. The flow-state generators, in RUSA’s case, are the sections.

RUSA has six sections, and each provides a place for energy and creativity to regenerate the division. In celebration of the lifeblood of RUSA, I talked to its section chairs about their sections and the future of the profession.

The six sections of RUSA seem to address very different elements of librarianship, so my first question was, What made you join RUSA and your section?

Michael Levine-Clark, chair of the Collection Development and Evaluation Section (CODES), stressed that at first RUSA fit his job and then over time he found RUSA kept him connected as he grew professionally. “At the time that I joined CODES, I was a reference librarian with collection development responsibilities. I was very interested in collection development issues and looked for places within ALA where I could fit those interests. As a reference librarian, I very much valued the connection between public service and collection development. I am now head of collection development, with no reference responsibilities whatsoever, but I still value the way that reference/public service can inform and be informed by collection development.” Each chair agreed. Judy Solberg, chair of the Reference Services Section (RSS), finds that the mix of reference and public service just worked for her: “I joined RUSA because of its focus on reference and user services. My library career has been focused on public services. I started my career as a reference librarian. RUSA offered programs and discussion groups that were relevant for my day-to-day work life.”

From the answers of each chair, it is clear that all of us, no matter our specialty, appreciate and value that RUSA approaches librarianship from a user-oriented service point of view. It is that philosophy of service, and our holistic approach to the profession, that is the glue that melds six different sections of RUSA together.

Following up on that, I asked the chairs, What is the best thing about your section?

I got back a resounding “our members!” David Lincove, chair of the History section (HS), says the best thing about his section is the “opportunities to meet colleagues from across the country and engage in discussions about common interests. The HS offers programs that draw many people because of the widespread interest in history and genealogy research, teaching, reference, new resources, and collection development.” Rosemary Meszaros, chair of the Machine-Assisted Reference Section (MARS), agrees “librarians from every type of library, from all parts of the country, and all with a keen interest in sharing their expertise and learning from others is the strength of MARS.” Stephanie Atkins, chair of the Sharing and Transforming Access to Resources Section (STARS), finds the same thing, “I am always so impressed with the wealth of knowledge and expertise of STARS members—and most importantly, their willingness to share information.”

There are many high-profile activities in each section, such as the Reading List in CODES and RSS’s Reference and Research Forum, but there are many hidden gems as well. My next question was about that very issue: What does your section offer that you think people might not know about?

A common reply centered on the section discussion groups. Solberg points out, “They are a great way to engage with colleagues and get involved with the section.” Almost all the sections have discussion groups of one kind or another, and they bring new ideas and information from the front lines of librarianship to the forefront of RUSA. A good example is the Business Reference and Services Section’s (BRASS) Publishers Forum. According to Rita Moss, BRASS chair, “it is a time for librarian members to talk about problems and issues with resources. This is pretty much a no-holds-barred discussion. We get to know about resources, the cost, and the problems. It is always very stimulating.” On the same theme of focusing on the new and hot issues, Meszaros talked about section preconferences, stressing that they are always “on a pressing topic of interest to all librarians every year.”

The focus of the sections on hot issues and the future of the profession led directly to the next question: What are the big trends or hot issues surrounding your section’s subject area(s)?

While all tilted toward the expertise of each section’s focus, replies were really about the same thing: the role of technology in defining the future of our work and the role of the section in helping figure out the changes in this landscape. CODES is looking at the change in reference publishing and electronic resources from a collection development point of view, and their Cooperative Collection Development Committee (which is a joint committee with STARS) is poised on the front lines of this issue. The History section, as Lincove points out, is facing the same issue with the “digitization of all types of resources for research in history and genealogy.” His section is looking at the “increasing number of high-quality online resources from vendors,” as well as the “increasing number of free resources of high quality available on the Internet” and the resulting “de-emphasis on browsing print materials and the decreasing size of reference collections as more materials appear online.” Meszaros says that MARS is considering the same landscape. “Reference is ever-changing. Innovative technologies as well as the very newest trends in reference service are on the forefront, issues such as privacy, gaming, Second Life, Facebook, MySpace, etc.” Solberg says RSS is seeing the same thing and wondering about the “changing nature of reference work and the best ways to assist our users. There are questions about the role of the reference desk and how to best use new technologies to assist people.” Over at STARS, “The big trends in ILL and resource-sharing revolve around technological changes too,” says Atkins. “Document delivery through RapidILL and similar systems are allowing us to get materials faster to users. STARS is also part of the Rethinking Resource Sharing initiative, whose mission is to get materials to users with the fewest barriers to access.” Moss sums up the situation for BRASS and all of RUSA this way: The future is all about the “cost of resources, outreach, and integrating new technologies.”

I think this is where flow comes from. All the sections are focused on the same issues and are bringing their own particular expertise and specialized knowledge to the question. As a follow-up, I asked, What is your section doing to address these hot issues?

Not surprisingly, the answer was, “A lot!” There were many examples—I’ll focus on three: CODES/STARS’s Cooperative Collection Development Committee, MARS’s Hot Topics, and RSS’s Management of Reference Committee. The Cooperative Collection Development Committee has been working to identify best practices in the area and, says Levine-Clark, “should become the place to go for information about cooperative collection building.” Meszaros shared that “the dynamics of reference work are being addressed by the MARS Hot Topics Discussion Group as well as by the Virtual Reference Discussion Group. Each presents a forum addressing the hot issues everyone is talking about.” At this past ALA Midwinter Meeting in Denver, RSS’s Management of Reference Committee hosted an open and informal discussion session on the topic, informally calling it “Embracing the Reference Desk: Who’s really in love—patrons or staff?”

Maybe it is this multiperspective approach to the creation of the profession and the ideals of the services we offer that provides RUSA with its flow-state energy. Maybe it is just that we all love what we do and are committed to doing it better each day, so flow is built into the process. Or perhaps it is because RUSA itself is built on the collaborative process of its six sections and is therefore constantly open to new ideas, new members, and new initiatives, and flow just wants to come along with us for the ride. In any case, whatever it is, it’s a lot of fun and we invite you all to join us.

Neal Wyatt, 2008–09 President of the Reference and User Services Association, is a Collection Development and Readers’ Advisory Librarian from Virginia. She wrote The Readers’ Advisory Guide to Nonfiction (ALA Editions, 2007), is an Editor of Library Journal’s “Reader’s Shelf” column, and compiles LJ’s weekly “Wyatt’s World Lists”; e-mail: rusa@ala.org.

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Close to fifteen years ago some very bright people in RUSA decided to create a space where the most significant reference research of the year could be shared with RUSA members and other ALA Annual Conference attendees. The Reference Research Forum, sponsored by the RSS Research and Statistics committee, highlights three research projects and informs the community of cutting edge and vital considerations in the field.

Over the past fourteen-plus years, the forum has stood as an example of the best of RUSA. It was innovative and allowed to happen—we are really good at trying new ideas. It was focused on front-line staff—we are all about the work that happens at the desk with the user. And it was collaborative—we are big on bringing people together.

We have a long history of doing good, and our past inspires our future. Long before the Reference Research Forum was conceived, RUSA established such venerated institutions as the Dartmouth Medal, the Notable Books List, and the Isadore Gilbert Mudge Award. All three groups select the best of our profession—the best reference book of the year; the most notable fiction, nonfiction, and poetry for adults; and the librarian who has best embodied our ideals. If RUSA’s achievements stopped at the creation of the Reference Research Forum, Notable Books, Dartmouth, and Mudge committees, we would have much to be proud of in our history. But RUSA has done a great deal more and is solidly focused on a future full of possibility.

RUSA’s guiding principle is its focus on the user, and much of our work is designed to help librarians working on the front desk or managing a department. We have national guidelines that inform professional practice, help us set benchmarks and local policy, and develop internal training and standards. Just recently, RUSA revised its definition of reference—a definition long recognized as a core document of the profession—and our guidelines on virtual reference (VR) have been used as part of the foundations of a new book on offering VR in your library. Virtual Reference Best Practices: Tailoring Services to Your Library by M. Kathleen Kern (ALA Editions, 2008) illustrates how RUSA’s guidelines can be used to shape local policy and guide implementation. If you have never spent time looking through the guidelines RUSA offers, take some time to do so. You will find the best thinking of our profession, sharply honed to help address any number of issues.

Looking toward the future, RUSA has many projects underway that will help us figure out what is next. MARS, the Machine-Assisted Reference Section of RUSA, debuted the MARS Virtual Poster Session, a project run by the MARS Management of Electronic Resources and Services Committee, at ALA Annual Conference 2008. The sessions all focused on using evaluation data to change and improve virtual reference. In future years the poster sessions will examine other hot topics in the field.

Hot off the presses, as it were, RUSA founded a juried book list that selects the best single book in eight different genres. The Reading List marks the first time ALA has focused its collective experience and attention on genre literature. The list is designed to help readers’ advisory (RA) and collection development librarians working with patrons and building collections. With one list published and the second to be announced at ALA Midwinter Meeting 2009, The Reading List is already regarded as a new standard in RA circles.

Another RA innovation that focuses on the future of our profession is the Readers’ Advisory Research and Trends Forum. The forum will focus attention on current RA needs, interests, concerns, directions, and possibilities, and address these issues in a collaborative conversation. The goal of the forum is to express the cutting-edge voice of RA; to be a place where ideas, best practices, and creative possibilities are actively engaged and deconstructed; to contribute to the advancement of RA service; to serve our patrons better; and to build and support the RA community.

Just recently formalized, RUSA, with the generous support of Harper Perennial, has started a new travel grant in honor of Zora Neale Hurston. Librarians working in any number of ways to raise awareness of and promote African American literature can apply for the grant, which not only includes funds to travel to ALA Annual Conference but tickets to the Literary Tastes Breakfast, the FOLUSA Tea, and copies of all the Zora Neale Hurston books published by Harper Perennial at the time of the award.

There is a lot more to discover about RUSA and an open invitation to everyone to get involved. I don’t suppose the creators of Notable Books or the Mudge award ever thought that their ideas would become enduring legacies of the profession, but they have.

It is my hope, fifteen years from now, that RUSA will celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the Reference Research Forum and the seventy-ninth, sixty-fifth, and forty-ninth anniversaries, respectively, of the Notable Books Council, the Isadore Gilbert Mudge Award, and the Dartmouth Medal. Those celebrations will be augmented by the fifteenth anniversaries of the MARS Virtual Poster Sessions (by then transformed through the very innovation they celebrate today), the Reading List, the Readers’ Advisory Research and Trends Forum, and the Zora Neale Hurston award, and I am certain that all of them will have contributed to the profession in ways we can only begin to imagine today.

I also hope, whether you are one year from retirement or just starting library school, that you will actively join in the creation of the future of RUSA and contribute to its enduring legacy by adding your voice and talents to our history. RUSA is an open door to innovation, discovery, and possibility—and we are just waiting for your next great idea to move us forward.

Neal Wyatt, 2008–09 President of the Reference and User Services Association, is a collection development and readers’ advisory librarian from Virginia. She wrote The Readers’ Advisory Guide to Nonfiction (ALA Editions, 2007), is an editor of Library Journal’s “Reader’s Shelf” column, and compiles LJ’s weekly “Wyatt’s World Lists”; e-mail: rusa@ala.org.

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Let’s do a little experiment. Before you read the rest of this article, go to your reference desk (or information desk, or help desk, or whatever term you use for your primary, in-person service point). Look around. What do you see? Are there people in the area? Are they staff or users? What are they doing? What library materials are they reading or using? What personal materials are they reading or using? Are they alone or in groups? Is it noisy or silent?
By some accounts, what you should be witnessing is a silent, dusty, empty warehouse with rows of books in perfect order, waiting for the odd chance that someone will come in to use one of them. The computers might be in use, but only for e-mail or basic Web surfing. Because the library is an irrelevant, technological backwater, there is little demand for even this aspect of library service. The reference librarian sits waiting for that one scholar who still uses print resources to come in and ask for help. The circulation staff spends their time rearranging the books on the shelves–the library equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. And everyone reminisces about the “good old days” when people actually used the library.

My guess is that this is not at all the image that you see (unless the library is closed when you are conducting the experiment). When I go to a library–and especially a public library–I see lots of people doing lots of different things. Rather than a silent and empty reading room, the reference area is crowded and noisy. It echoes with the sound of conversations, keyboards, printers, self-checkout machines, cell phones, and the ever-present music seeping out of teenagers’ headphones. There is activity, vitality, and a sense of energy. The atmosphere is more like that of a shopping mall than a museum. Interestingly, this environment is true no matter which branch of my public library I enter. Whether at the downtown branch that serves primarily inner-city residents, or at a brand-new suburban branch, the excitement of the library is the same.

Even my academic library, which is currently undergoing a $100 million expansion (see www.maddenlibrary.org for details), retains that same atmosphere. Although some of our users may be forced to come in because of homework assignments, most are here because they see the library as a destination of choice on campus. They use the computers; read the magazines and newspapers; check out and return books; write, revise, and edit papers; and generally hang out with each other. Students interact with other students, faculty, and library staff. Our space may be small, but our users continue to take advantage of it as much as possible. My guess is that this is exactly the type of image that you see at your library.

As with Mark Twain’s death, the demise of the library has been greatly exaggerated. Much has been written about “library as place.” Those who predict the coming irrelevancy of the library have focused on only one of its key functions. They see the role of the library primarily as a source of information, which is only one of many activities that take place there. With the proliferation of alternative information sources (especially the Internet), our users are able to retrieve factual information on their own much more easily than at any time in human history. If the sole–or even primary–purpose of the library were to be a source of factual information, its future would, indeed, be rather limited.