Competency I

Use service concepts, principles and techniques that facilitate information access, relevance, and accuracy for individuals or groups of users

In this age of easily accessed information, it is the services that a library provides that set it apart. The librarian is there to assist the information seeker by answering questions, guiding, and conducting searches. This assistance may be given to individual patrons, or may be given to groups, and can take several forms, but there are certain concepts and principals that underlie information service.

Concepts

Libraries and other information institutions are built on the concept of providing free access to information. Whether this access is restricted or available to the general public depends on the kind of institution. An academic library, for example, might limit its access to students and faculty, while a public library would make its collection open to everyone. Another central concept is the preservation of information. This is the main drive behind archives and rare book collections; they want to preserve the past to make it available for the future.

Principles

Libraries want to provide people with the best possible access to information. This can mean different things for different groups or individuals, and one principal of library work is to focus on the needs of the patrons. The information should be provided without bias or prejudice. The library is there to serve the public, and the preferences and biases of the people working there shouldn't have an influence. There's also the principal of providing equal access to information, which can mean accommodating disabilities, or dealing with a language barrier.

Techniques

There are many ways librarians can serve the information needs of their patrons. There are passive techniques such as search tutorials on the Web site, or signs and flyers available in the library. Patron can be helped individually by the librarian conducting a searching and assessing the information for them, or by showing the patron how to look for the information themselves. The library can also provide classes and workshops to assist groups. These can be in anything from how to use a computer, to research techniques, to training in a specific software.

Access

Access to information can be provided through the Web site in the form of databases and the online catalog. Librarians should make sure these are easily accessible and clearly marked; patrons won't use resources they don't know exist. Pathfinders can be created to meet specific information needs. For every collection, some sort of finding aid must be available. The physical library should also be clear and easy to use. Aisle-ways should be kept clear and should be wide enough to accommodate disabilities, and the library should have enough signage that patrons can find the section or item they want.

Relevance

Information is only useful if it is relevant. This starts with understanding the specific information need at hand. Often this means the librarian needs to conduct a reference interview. Once the need is understood, the available information would need to be examined and filtered. Relevance isn't an either/or question, and the librarian is often called on to judge how relevant a resource is to a particular need. The automatic ranking systems used by most search engines can help, but they can't replace the judgement of a live person.

Accuracy

Information must also be accurate. The anarchistic nature of the internet means that a lot of the information that is readily available is not going to be substantiated, and may be wrong. Even something that has been professionally published may be misleading or even inaccurate. Librarians might have a handful of reputable general sources that they can turn to in most situations, but they will also need to be able to judge the accuracy of a source. Often this means making a judgement call when verification is not available.

The first piece of evidence is the pathfinder I made for my class on reference and information services. The assignment was to compile information relevant to a question we were given from another class member. We had to sift through all the information we found and present the best pieces. This required making value judgements on both the relevance and the accuracy of the information. How we presented the information was up to us, and I decided that a Web site provided the best access, since most of the articles were from online databases.

The second piece of evidence is a series of searches I did in the Lexis-Nexis databases. For this assignment, we had to first decide which databases to search in, then perform targeted searches. We then had to judge the results for both relevance and accuracy, and decide which results best answered the search scenarios we were given. These were the type of questions a librarian might face at the reference desk.