Library and Information Science Commons^™

Good Enough: The New Face Of Reference, Doug Way, Colleen Lyon

Conference Proceedings

College students today flock to Wikipedia in droves, while at the same time academic libraries continue to pour time and money into print reference collections that are rarely used and take huge amounts of our libraries’ limited space. While libraries have responded to space and access concerns by turning to electronic books, title-by-title selection is a time-consuming affair for a collection that sees low use. In this paper we examine the factors that have led to the point where libraries need to reexamine how they collect and provide access to reference sources. Through a content analysis of reference transcripts and …