If your library is like mine, the use of print reference sources has declined dramatically over the past several years. Since fewer patrons are using these materials, I am thinking of rewarding those that do by letting them check them out. I already give special permission to just about anyone who asks me if they can check out a reference book, so I am thinking about making this a standard policy and making all reference books available for a 24 hour loan.
My thinking behind this has always been that I would rather have a book taken out and used by a patron than sitting unused on our library shelves. When I proposed this to the other librarians in my department, it was viewed as a radical departure from existing procedure. I do understand that there is a risk of letting expensive reference books go out of the building, yet at the same time I feel that we buy them to be used. If they are not used much in the building, why not let people take them home?
What are your thoughts on giving all reference books a standard 24 hour loan period?
We've allowed our reference books to circulate for 2 days for a couple of years now. I hadn't considered keeping “expensive” books in the library; we have many more expensive books in our stacks. My main consideration was that I was always making exceptions to allow folks to check reference books out AND I have alternative (mostly online) sources for most of the answers within those reference books now. Circulating reference books works well in my library.
We have recently begun allowing short period circulation for our reference collection which surely beats lack of use. I think we worry less about other things that are more expensive—there's no answer to the cost issue unless we put a sticker on every new book with its cost so I vote circulate reference books for a short period and do as we have done—make that reference collection a working collection—be honest about what you really use this week or month and not 10 or 2 years ago.
This past summer at the University of Richmond we culled a very small portion of the print collection to keep available though the summer. Then we boxed up the rest of it to free shelving for space during a major renovation project that temporarily displaced large sections of the circulating collection. Before the end of spring semester we advertised widely to faculty that they could borrow reference books for the summer if they needed them for their work. Some did.
Over the summer only one faculty member, who had not paid attention to our communications, came in and wanted a book that was boxed. I was potentially inconvenienced when I wanted a quotations dictionary to use for comparative purposes while writing a review of a new quotations dictionary. But I found an appropriate one on netLibrary and used it.
By start of the fall semester the reference books were back on their shelves. Summer school at Richmond is very small. Were it larger we would have good information on the role and importance of the printed reference collection. As it is, we have transferred a number of reference titles to the circulating collection.
So, we can benefit from more experimentation and some well crafted research studied on loan of reference books in academic libraries.
I'm glad you've raised this issue. Our Reference collection at Northwestern is comparatively large, and certainly things do get used, but not of course to the extent they once did, and many items get used very occasionally. They don't circulate officially, but we've become increasingly liberal about signing them out, with exceptions, mainly those items that do receive regular use. And if the item is less likely to be called for, we sometime let it out for a week or more. Since this process is all manual, and therefore the catalog doesn't show that the item is out, I've been wondering if we should simply allow something like a 48-hour circulation, with some items designated non-circulating. For example, I wouldn't want the Chicago Manual of Style to go out, at least until we get the online. Or the US News rankings of grad schools. And we might need to have a procedure to temporarily designate something non-circulating if it was to be used by a specific class.
Of course, items could be transferred to the circulating collection, which we are all doing on a regular basis. But having much of this material in the reference room may, I think, facilitate its use, by reminding the reference staff of its existence, and by having it where we can show it to users for whom the use of print reference materials is increasingly unfamiliar experience. But not then being able to take the item home is often the barrier.
I should say I haven't yet raised this yet with more than a couple of my colleagues, and it is certainly likely to be seen as a radical departure. Yet there is much print reference material out there that is still useful even in our current environment, and I think we need to think about the best way to get it into our users' hands.
Our reference works may circulate when special permission is granted by reference staff. We may specify whether checkout is for 2 hours, 24 hours, or 3 days, and the due date displays in the catalog.
In my large sci-tech library, we're midway through an aggressive weeding of our reference collection. The fate of multi-disciplinary items is determined by the whole group, and subject specialists determine the level of thinning for their areas.
Many of our decisions have been no-brainers. When we encounter titles that nobody knew we had, we've tended to assume they will fare no lonelier a fate in the stacks. I am concerned, though, about those obscure titles that I would never find in the catalog but that I might indeed find while perusing call#s in the reference area. (Of course the subject-specific items classed in the Z's are the most obscure — but we're planning to reclass some of those titles so they'll scan better.)
As editor of the Sci-Tech-Med section of the forthcoming 12th edition of the Guide to Reference Sources, I'm tuned to the importance of creating tools that will help us continue to identify the obscure reference works that we're relegating to the stacks. Our catalogs alone (i.e. LCSH) aren't enough.
I'm a former reference librarian who worked in a city reference library in the days before the Internet. I'm still a practising librarian, although it's many years since I've been on the reference desk. I live in a large city with an excellent reference library in the heart of downtown. When I've been searching the online catalogue from home or at work I've found it increasingly frustrating to find that the only copy of books I need or want is located in the main reference library and I can't even get it brought to my local branch to read on site there, let alone check it out. These books are often “marginal” ref books – an interesting or authoritative discussion of a topic, but not a yearbook, dictionary, or directory. There's no way I'm going downtown to look at such books, and so the library loses a visitor, an in-house use, and/or a potential check-out. One statistic may not matter, but this happens frequently to me, and I'm a fairly mainstream (if eclectic) reader, so how many uses is the library losing? Through online access to the catalogue the library has increased awareness of the materials it has in reference collections, and with the same stroke increased user dissatisfaction by continuing to keep those materials inaccessible to anyone who lives more than a short distance from the central library who doesn't have time or inclination to spend at least half a day plus parking fees on a trip downtown. A sub-text is the knowledge that the loan of anything in the reference library is totally non-negotiable – and even if there are any circumstances in which books might be made equitably available throughout the city, God forbid that the library make this generally known; people would be asking to borrow the darn books all the time.
My experience has made me realise the extent of the reassessment that needs to be made on the purpose of the reference library and how it delivers the information it stores. Nowadays, information searchers make do with the information to be found on the internet; it's often what we need, even if we might have preferred to get the tantalizing item that's available only in the remote reference library. We – and those we work for – expect to complete research without waiting for a visit downtown, because there is a wealth of materials available so readily through electronic searching, or from amazon etc. I expect reading to come to me – or at least to my local library.
As a librarian-turned-user, I would like to see some awareness that the way people want to use library resources is changing. Digitization works for the special collecitions and other similar materials. Electronic databases bring periodical and other former “in library only” materials to our desk top. But what of the mainstream collections that a reference library keeps? How are we increasing access to the rows and rows of books which comprise authoritative collections put together for the library systems' users, who increasingly expect information and resources to be delivered to their home or desktop. As a former reference librarian I know, deep down, that I could tell the difference between a book which had to be available on the shelves at all times, and which ones could be loaned for a short period, or to another library for consultation on site. In 15 years as a reference librarian I regularly loaned items, and I only remember one occasion when an important book didn't come back from a loan, and one occasion when someone had travelled to see a book and it wasn't available.
One final point – I don't include special, unique or historic collections items in this general picture. Some things have to stay put, where they can be cared for and kept safe. Some things are still well worth travelling for.
Frances
If you had to travel across campus or across town, and stay in another building, just to use an encyclopedia, would you? Really? You wouldn't Google instead? Try it. Next time you need to consult one of your reference books, get it, and take it as far from the reference collection as your average patron has to travel to get to your reference collection. Preferably while it is raining, or, like today, here, approximately 1 degree outside, and about 10 degrees too cold for comfort here at the reference desk. Sit there and use it. Do not take it to your office, staff lounge, home, etc. Do not make free photocopies of the pages you need. After returning the book, if you realize you need to use it again, go all the way back across campus or town to use it again.
I have routinely circulated reference books (at DePauw University's main library) for all of breaks & summers for about 5 years, with no problems. We routinely give special permission for loans of reference books for a few days, and I, who NEVER say no, would like very much to move to automatic 3 day loan. (A reference book that someone does use could easily get misplaced or intentionally hidden in our library for a few days, so has no benefit over one that's checked out to someone.) I've also moved about 1/2 of the collection to the stacks.
Other libraries with more active in house use may have more (though I think not generally persuasive) concerns about circulating ref books, but from reshelving data I can tell that most books in our reference collection don't even get used once a year. Keeping things in ref with shorter circulation makes it more likely that they'll not spend years in faculty offices, and makes using them for reference and creating guides, etc. much easier, so we're not likely to get rid of the ref collection. But refusing to let someone who does want to use one of them do so in comfort on the off chance that at the same time a second person might want to use the same one makes no more sense with reference books than the rest of the collection.
I’m new to this blog and RUSA and have been searching for institutions that have implemented circulating reference. I am having a hard time finding some more experiences, positive or negative, in regards to this reference decision other than the few here. I know this discussion is from 2007 but am hoping to revive it.
Are there any other experiences with circulating reference?