Comments on: Update on Eliminating Our Reference Collection

By: Swiss Army Librarian » Reference Question of the Week – 1/27/13 :: Brian Herzog

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 17:23:15 +0000

[...] our most recent editions of traditional reference titles, our 2013edition of Writer's Market is a 7 Day Loan item, instead of in-library reference only. Even though it's been almost two years since we eliminated [...]

By: Swiss Army Librarian » Reference Question of the Week – 8/12/12 :: Brian Herzog

Sat, 18 Aug 2012 15:12:03 +0000

[...] I felt a sense of dread – we used to have a book exactly like that, but I think I weeded it when we eliminated our reference collection. I remember thinking, "no one will ever come looking for this – besides, I'm sure it's on the [...]

By: Brian Herzog

Brian Herzog — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 00:15:41 +0000

@Martha: any time – I’d be happy to give you a tour, if you like. Just let me know.

By: Martha Patten

Martha Patten — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 14:45:07 +0000

That looks great – it seems like it will do a good job of meeting your patrons’ needs! A couple of us might drop by from Carlisle tomorrow to take a look – we’re brainstorming ideas for reconfiguring our own space.

By: Brian Herzog

Brian Herzog — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 15:54:59 +0000

@Mark: I agree – although, we’d have individual volumes from reference sets go missing even before people could check them out. In fact, I was hoping by legally letting people take them home, it would reduce the risk of them just being outright stolen. We did leave the full set price on each volume, so if a patron does check one out and not return it, they’re faced with the full replacement cost. We’ll see what actually happens if we do lose one that had been checked out.

Oh, and as for being available when patrons need it: that’s why we reduced the loan period to just a week for these items (instead of our regular three week non-fiction loans). They are also non-requestable and non-renewable, which I am hoping will mean they are available more often than not. This is just our first attempt at this though, and if we find it not working, we’ll modify to improve.

@Erika: I’m actually kind of curious about that myself. I’ve talked a little about this with my director, and she agreed that it makes sense to totally revamp the reference budget. We haven’t started developing the budget for our next fiscal year, but I expect we’ll create a new “online reference” budget and use that just for databases, and the rest of the materials budget will be absorbed into non-fiction. We’ll still keep a small reference budget, for our ready reference collection, microfilm, and a few other odds and ends, but I think this will be extremely small, and that our non-fiction budget will increase dramatically.

By: Mark Hudson

Mark Hudson — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 19:06:36 +0000

To my previous comments I would just add that our library already makes a considerable amount of reference material available in circulating non-fiction. For example, most of the brief single-volume Facts on File titles in the natural sciences, social sciences, world literatures and religion, etc. circulate in non-fiction. But more extensive reference titles, and particularly multi-volume sets, are “library use only” for the reasons stated earlier.

By: Erika B

Erika B — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 15:13:16 +0000

We have talked about this whole idea a number of times in my library. I would be interested to hear how you worked out the collection development budget. At my library we have a much larger $ amount for reference than for the other subject areas individually. Did you divide it up or allocate the “Reference” budget throughout the rest of the collection budgets?

By: Mark Hudson

Mark Hudson — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 14:06:29 +0000

Brian: It sounds like this was the right decision for your library and community. But in the medium-sized public library where I work, patrons rarely if ever refuse to photocopy or take notes from a page in a reference book. We help many students from the local high school and community college, and they seem to understand the concept of “library use only” pretty well. I would be concerned that, if we circulated the reference books, they might not be there when other patrons needed them. Reference books are much more expensive to replace than regular non-fiction books, and if a volume in a multi-volume set goes missing, it can be quite difficult to replace that single volume. I don’t want to be showing someone the Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, and then have to explain that the article they need isn’t there because the volume containing that article is checked out or permanently gone from the collection.

By: Brian Herzog

Brian Herzog — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 02:13:50 +0000

@Mark: I think @Stephanie actually addresses your comment. I didn’t mean to imply that reference books themselves weren’t worthwhile – they certainly are. The problem, at least in my community, is that no one used them because they couldn’t take them home. So, instead of just getting rid of them, we just got rid of the “Reference” designation and as many as possible circulating – that way, patrons actually could use these valuable resources in a way that fit their needs (which is the need to use it at home).

Here’s how I worked things out:
Keeping them reference = patrons didn’t use them = zero value to library

Let them go out = patrons actually use them = more valuable to everyone

But I recognize this might not be true for all libraries. Mine is a medium-size public library, focusing on popular materials, homework help, and general reference assistance. In a library where the staff is doing serious academic research, a traditional reference collection makes more sense. But in my library, if a patron can’t take it home, they couldn’t care less about it – even when I pointed right to the answer on a page in the book. They wouldn’t even photocopy it. This is the reality of my community that we’re responding to.

By: Mark Hudson

Mark Hudson — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 15:26:38 +0000

Interesting that your print reference collection “isn’t meeting the needs of the community.” I use our print reference materials every day at the reference desk. The depth and quality of information is so much higher than what exists online, including even our best online databases. When the government of our state cut the budget for reference databases, I was very glad we had put so much time and energy into developing a solid, up-to-date print reference collection, because we weren’t dependent on the databases the way libraries that have downsized or eliminated their print reference collections were.