Preference for Reference: New Options and Choices for Academic Library Users
Bibliographic record
Abstract
<p>This exploratory study investigated the help-seeking preferences of library users at two large urban universities in Toronto, Reference desk and virtual reference users were compared in terms of their perceptions of the options now available for obtaining reference help. The premise for the study was based on the assumption that a reasonable exposure to newer reference services, such as chat and email had occurred, therefore allowing for an examination of emerging preferences for different types of services. Surveys were distributed to both reference desk and virtual reference users asking seven core questions exploring use and preference for reference services as well as habits and their research outside the library. The study concludes with recommendations for planning and for future research, preferences for study location (in library, off campus, etc.). The results suggest that the reference desk continues to be the most popular method of getting help in the library, but virtual reference satisfies a niche for users who prefer to work outside the library. Those who use virtual reference tend to perceive their options for getting help differently from other users. Virtual reference users do not perceive virtual reference as a novelty or as a marginal service, but see it as a significant service option. In addition, the results show that virtual reference services may have a special appeal to graduate students since graduate students seem more likely to conduct their research outside the library. The study concludes with recommendations for planning and for future research.</p>
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".