California's Reference Crisis.

California librarians are being squeezed between increased reference requests and reduced capacity. Their message: Help local libraries meet new demand now or reference service is in jeopardy

THE STATE THAT houses about 12 percent of all U.S. citizens and generates about 12 percent of the nation's gross domestic product is in crisis. In a dramatic display of things gone wrong, California has suddenly become a riches-to-rags story. Faced with many challenges to the social and economic order, that state's future seems to depend on two things: resuscitating an economy that has depended on a shrinking defense industry; and addressing population shifts that have decreased per capita income and increased the proportion of people in need.

As goes the state, so go its libraries. Public libraries and their reference services are also in turbulence, for the same reasons: few resources and much demand.

As goes the state, so goes the country? Perhaps. The social and economic pressures squeezing California are found around the country--maybe less pronounced, maybe with a different nuance. In every comer of the union, we could find pictures of public library reference service that look as complex and desperate as California's. The situation in erstwhile paradise has lessons for most of us, unfortunately.

The lesson for today is irony--scarcity of resources and surfeit of demand--and response to the irony.

In 1993 the California State Library commissioned a study to uncover the condition of public library reference service and to explore ways to improve it. The data came from focus groups and individual interviews with reference chiefs and directors of public libraries; system-level reference staff; reference-minded staff from school, institutional, academic, and special libraries; and selected state-level staff. What follows is the picture painted by that data.

Over the years, reference service in California's public libraries has been addressed through several major statewide programs that have attracted attention around the country. Three of these programs have gained prominence.

The System Reference Program consists of reference centers that blanket the state to serve as the second level in a reference referral hierarchy. The State of California Answering Network (SCAN) is the capstone of that reference hierarchy. The California Opportunities for Reference Excellence (CORE) program is charged with improving reference collections and reference skills in public libraries.

Despite generally positive reviews of these efforts from the library community, the reference function is uniformly characterized by the respondents as severely degraded over the past ten to 15 years. They use terms like "mediocre," "threatened," "going downhill fast," and "dying." Some library jurisdictions have not lost serious resources, and for them the reference situation is acceptable or actually prospering, but these cases are rare.

The reference function is also seen as uneven. Even within a jurisdiction, one branch may have no technology more advanced than the telephone and a copying machine while another has telefacsimile, file transfer, electronic mail, an online public access catalog (OPAC) with integrated remote files, and bibliographic and full-text databases.

In 1978, Proposition 13 decreased property tax statewide. Public library budgets began to erode. In recent years, the devastation of Prop 13 has been augmented by local budget cuts. The result is a reduced capacity to deliver reference service, for many reasons. Fewer hours open and fewer staff are the most general and widespread causes of lost capacity. Depending on the particular library, this has led to fewer total requests handled in some cases, or more questions handled per hour in most cases.

There is thinner staffing of the desk, leading to more hours at the desk for each staff member, covering more subject areas per staff member. The situation has meant spending less time on each reference question. It has resulted in a loss of staff skills, because trainers and trainees have less time for in-service training. They also have insufficient reference tools either in-house or accessible remotely, especially in small libraries. One major effect of reduced capacity, in addition to the number of requests handled, is what many described as reduced goodness (completeness, authoritativeness, soundness) of answers.

On the other hand, there are three points of light in the current environment, all related to new resources potentially at the disposal of the public library reference staff. Turnaround time has improved in some cases, due to technology such as FAX transmission and E-mail. There are also improved reference resources and some electronic databases making answers easier to find in many cases. Finally, electronic technologies have broadened access to answers and source documents. A request that would have been referred on to the second reference level before the difficulties now stands a better chance of being answered locally. Even with new topics and an increase in complexity of questions, a greater proportion can be handled locally if the technology is in place. Nevertheless, reference capacity is overwhelmingly down.

While reporting reduced capacity, the participants also reported an ironic increase in the demand for reference service. The numbers are felt to be "up dramatically." One librarian claimed to be "as busy in...30 hours as when we were open 72 hours a week."

"We went from 200 and some thousand to 400 and some thousand questions--with vacancies, with the short hours," said another. There is strong agreement that volume of reference service will continue to climb.

State statistics from 1974 through 1992 support the view. Although reference per capita and reference per borrower have declined as the state's population has grown, reference questions have increased in absolute numbers. The numbers are growing especially in the suburbs. Yet in large urban central libraries, volume has decreased. Statistical correlations show also that, to a small degree, as staff resources in the state have fallen, reference activity has increased.

The increase in reference numbers in public libraries seems to be fueled to a large degree by the loss of other sources of answers (such as a tax information office); the loss of professional librarians in schools and community colleges; and to a lesser degree by the reduction of certain public library services and a shift of demand to more prosperous neighboring public libraries.

The nature of user expectations and the nature of the questions they ask has changed at least as much as the numbers. This is another way the demand for reference services, and thus for staff and collections, is increasing.

As is the case elsewhere, California is feeling the information revolution. Public expectations are also changing in terms of what information is out there ("everything") and the speed of access to it ("immediate"). With the popular emergence of electronic access, more people expect simple delivery of the answer, rather than guidance or instruction. This seems to be the case for both children and adults and people with specialist needs (such as physician or broker) and everyday needs. The mission of the public library may be metamorphosing from a leisure orientation to a strong orientation to information delivery, retrieval education, and retrieval strategy.

There is also the fear that widespread use of electronic databases will disenfranchise those who do not have electronic access from home or work, and the respondents strongly endorsed the idea of the public library as an "information safety net."

Users present a larger array of requests, with needs ranging from uneducated to expert, and across many language groups. In some subject areas (e.g., business, employment, investment, medicine), they are more knowledgeable about information in their fields, and their questions often require specialized and expensive materials or databases and experienced staff to answer. Yet the demand for answers to "garden variety" questions (how to write a resume, the meaning of amour-propre, information about the wheaten terrier dog) is undiminished. Especially challenging are the Asian populations, with their varied cultures, a plethora of languages (one librarian claimed to be collecting in 50 languages), the lack of popular information in most of those languages (such as car repair, consumer information, or legal information), and the lack of textual information in digital form.

Topics are shifting, with more emphasis on career (resumes, job-seeking, job preparation), business information (running a business, marketing information, international trade, defense industry conversion), and medical information. As is natural with new topics, reference requests often precede the availability of material for answering them. Current examples are the above-mentioned defense industry conversion, product assessment, "jazz revival," and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Dealing with questions about them is difficult and time-consuming.

A larger array of services is offered in many places: compact disc and online searching, FAX transmission, OPACs, online databases, the Internet, and information and referral (I&R). The library often acts as an information coordinator or clearinghouse among various community agencies. Electronic document delivery is being introduced.

Predictably, the "new" public library is so complex, say the respondents, that effective self-help is virtually impossible without more bibliographic instruction or better tools, such as good electronic gateways. At the same time, user preparedness is declining. First, more users are nontraditional library users--often new residents--unacquainted with the library. Second, fewer students are acquainted with library processes--such as searching for a periodical title, recognizing a successful search, using a catalog, knowing how materials are arranged on the shelf--due in large part to lack of library instruction in the schools.

Most of those interviewed consider these conditions and emerging trends likely to continue for the next decade.

What we have here is irony: fewer resources against higher demand. In the search for relief, public libraries are trying a variety of things. With an increasing assortment of technologies and information sources and services to choose from, they seem to be positioning themselves idiosyncratically. The factors in that idiosycratic position are their users' demands, the use of electronic information resources, the use of the various communication technologies, budgetary constraints, and the individual library's particular sense of the public library mission.

Several libraries are employing timesaving tactics. There is more referral of the user, who is directed to an outside source, such as a government agency or a commercial service. More questions are referred to the second reference level because of lack of time to answer them. (In some cases fewer questions are so referred because of lack of time to develop the user's question and process the paper work.) There are fewer reference interviews and more questions are taken at face value, without negotiation. More questions now receive a bibliographic or bibliographic-instructional response, rather than an answer to the question asked, in order to make the user self-sufficient over the long term.

In some other cases, however, more questions receive the exact information asked for, in order to save time in the short term. There is increased dependence on individual staff judgment to determine the service delivered, resulting in inconsistent service outputs (laissez-faire reference). Several participants admitted that reference staff often test the strength and "validity" of a user's need to determine which questions to pursue vigorously. As these reports indicate, libraries are sometimes adopting contradictory solutions to the same problem.

There are individual instances of more specific tactics--none of them new but all illustrating how libraries are responding to reference adversities. One library joins with other libraries to establish a multijurisdictional business library. Another separates telephone and walk-in reference service to increase answering capacity and keep telephone demand from interrupting walk-in business.

A third shares CD-ROMs with all branches through a multiserver. A library permits dial-in access to the library's OPAC from home to slough off catalog information questions. Paraprofessionals and trained volunteers direct users to appropriate CD-ROM stations and refer failed searches or difficult questions to the professional librarians in some cases. In others, paraprofessionals instruct users in OPAC and microfilm equipment use and give basic instruction in such data files as InfoTrac. Numerous libraries are deliberately curtailing reference service by limiting the time spent on questions, the time spent away from the desk, the number of resources tried per question, or by not answering the phone when there's a queue of patrons at the desk.

The participants also suggested larger-than-local solutions. Most were directed to the state library. This was inevitable, since it sponsored the study and is interested in improving things. The most widely endorsed, top 11 suggestions for a better reference profile in California public libraries are listed in the sidebar (above). They have validity nationwide as well.

California faces multiple ironies in the present and foreseeable future. These same ironies are faced by much of this country, from Anchorage to Amherst to Austin. The economy in many places is troubled--while social needs proliferate. Library resources are greatly diminished--while user demand grows and new service opportunities explode. The galloping growth of information technologies insists libraries act aggressively in order not to lose their traditional reference mission--but there is no money to do so. Library users need more help in this bewildering information environment--yet the staff can hardly maintain previous levels of service.

Faced with these ironies, the overriding message from our California confreres is: Prepare local libraries and their branches to handle the bulk of reference questions, through continued training, materials support, and that new "essential" resource, electronic access and delivery. Spend less energy on answering rarer reference questions. Spend energy, and particularly collective energy, on solving reference problems at the local level, so as to improve the capacity to respond to the majority of reference questions. Help the local library outlet respond to the swell of new demand, they tell us, or the future of the public library reference function is in jeopardy.

PHOTO: Thomas A. Childers