The future of reference and information services in a virtual world
Bibliographic record
Abstract
RQ1: How have reference and information services changed with the increasing influence of online information and information environments? RQ2: What are the likely next developments in virtual reference and information services? Data were gathered using two methods. First, the researchers conducted a series of three focus groups at the ASIS T and ALISE annual meetings from January 2008 through January 2009. The focus group attendees were professors and instructors who teach reference and information courses at ALA-accredited universities in the U.S. and Canada. There were a total of 16 participants from 13 universities. Next, the researchers collected data from audience members at a town hall-style meeting of faculty and others interested in digital reference education at the ALISE 2009 annual meeting. Approximately 55 audience members took part in the town hall meeting, at which the presenters briefly discussed their current reference and information services-related research and then asked the audience members to address four research questions, two of which are addressed in this poster. The data were analyzed using the constant comparative method, the most common method for analyzing qualitative data (Glase Strauss, 1967; Lincoln Guba, 1985). The constant comparative method involves repeatedly reading through a set of data, grouping and regrouping individual pieces of data into multiple sets of smaller groups until the set of groups that best answers the research questions is found. Data analysis showed that virtual reference and information services, and reference and information services in general, have changed greatly due to the influence of the electronic information explosion and of the steady stream of new information technologies as well. Six major themes relating to the current and future state of virtual and face-to-face reference emerged: These six themes indicate a continued shift away from a linear reference process, in which the librarian is the information provider and the user is information receiver, to a more interactive, collaborative reference model, in which the reference librarian and the reference user both play the roles of information seeker, information receiver, and information creator. As these roles continue to evolve, the challenge will be to design and implement technologies that can support and enhance them. This research was supported by a grant from the Institute for Museum Library Services (IMLS) under the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Grant program.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".