Using Public Library Reference Collections and Staff

Using Public Library Reference Collections and StaffAuthor(s): Thomas A. ChildersSource: The Library Quarterly, Vol. 67, No. 2 (Apr., 1997), pp. 155-173Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40039701 .

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USING PUBLIC LIBRARY REFERENCE COLLECTIONS AND STAFF1

Thomas A. Childers2

An exploratory study of reference services use in a public library was performed through fifty-seven user interviews in an affluent and primarily An- glo community in California. Two subsequent studies were conducted in His- panic and Vietnamese communities. The data from the Anglo sample generated a set of preliminary relationships: mediated and unmediated searches yield about the same user judgment of completeness; mediated searches yield a somewhat higher judgment of usefulness; users who do not ask for help ordinarily have a known source (not an index or catalog) in mind before coming to the library; and searches are overwhelmingly of a "serious" rather than "casual" nature, even to an outside observer. It was found that additional staff help might have improved the results for about 40 percent of the searches, including some cases when the user had had professional-level interactions with the staff. At the broadest level, the idea of the "search in motion" was affirmed and users were seen to avail themselves of reference services in a variety of ways. The findings of the Hispanic and Vietnamese studies largely echoed those of the original study; but the Hispanic and Vietnamese respondents used the reference collection more often for school, and they - especially the Vietnamese - more often brought broad subject needs, rather than requests for specific information, to the library.

Background

In the early 1990s, the California State Library staff and I began a program of assessing reference performance in the state's public libraries. Evaluations were undertaken of the current conditions of providing reference service across the state [1], of performance at the reference desk at the local library outlet, and of performance by the reference

1. A. B. Kroeger Professor, College of Information Science and Technology, Drexel Univer- sity, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104.

2. The studies were funded by a Library Services and Construction Act grant administered in California by the state librarian. No endorsement by federal or state agencies is implied.

[Library Quarterly, vol. 67, no. 2, pp. 155-173] © 1997 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

0024-2519/97/6702-0003$01.00

155



156 THE LIBRARY QUARTERLY

referral (backup) network. The primary focus in all of the assessments was the goodness of response of the library institution. A key piece that was missing from the picture of California reference activity was the way in which the user interacted, unmediated, with reference collections and the degree of success the user achieved. Direct use of collections, including reference collections, by the customer is an essential part of the public library's service program. The long-standing professional institutions of descriptive cataloging, public catalogs, classed arrangement of materials, open stacks, and signage systems manifest the importance the profession has attached historically to direct access. Moreover, where staff resources are scarcer than in years past, librarians are concerned that the need for such access will grow [1].

Searches of the literature and inquiries to peers revealed few studies of unmediated use of reference materials and how that use related to user success. Many studies of the use of electronic resources exist, but they tend to be narrow, focusing on the interchange between machine and user, or organizational, looking at policy, organizational resources, and so on. Likewise, studies of the reference interchange between user and library staff member abound. But there are few studies of the user's interaction with and success in using reference collections in public libraries. Underscoring the need for inquiry in this area, Jo Bell Whitlatch [2] reported in 1992 on a brainstorming session sponsored by the Reference and Adult Services Division's Research and Statistics Committee. The group identified needed research on reference effectiveness, listing under " Collection Use" two questions about reference: "Who uses the reference collection and what sources do they use?" and "How do patrons use reference collections?"

In the research closest to our study's question, Ruth White [3] reported in 1971 on a multifaceted study of reference services in the greater Atlanta region. From ninety-four interviews with public libraries users, the study found that 74 percent of those claiming to have used the "reference services of this library" tried to solve the reference problem themselves; 93 percent got the information they needed (a success indicator) ; 54 percent were given instructions on how to find the answer; 37 percent claimed that the librarian offered to get information from other places; and of those indicating that improvements were needed in the reference department, 82 percent mentioned materials to meet reference demands. The study offers a simple sketch of unmediated or partially mediated reference use, rather than a detailed picture. The success of the user's search by the type of materials used was unexplored.

In 1988, Daniel R. Arrigona and Eleanor Mathews [4] reported on a study of the differences in consulting reference materials between



REFERENCE COLLECTIONS AND STAFF 157

librarians and college student users. They found a difference in the subject areas of the collection that were consulted by the two types, but there was no effort to relate this to a success factor.

Richard Rubin [5], reporting in 1986, compared four methods of measuring in-house use of public library materials. The most promising approach, the individual user interview, collected coarse-grained data on the number of items used and type of material (that is, fiction, non- fiction, magazine, and newspaper) . The purpose of the visit to the library was also sought. However, neither use of the reference collection nor user success was studied.

Three small studies we undertook in 1993 and 1995 were intended to fill the void. They were meant to explore the public's success in self- use of print reference materials and how self-use occurs. The first study took place in a library serving an upper-middle-class, primarily Anglo, community. In order to explore ethnic differences in reference service use, we later studied libraries in Hispanic and Vietnamese communities.

As it turned out, the studies captured a more holistic view of the user's reference activity. They depict a variegated reference function that includes mediated searching, utilization of print and nonprint material, and the fluidity of user needs and their reference acts.

Methodology

Observation of and interviews with users of reference collections led to a semistructured interview schedule that was pretested in a branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia. The first study was sited at the main branch of the Santa Monica Public Library (SMPL). It was selected because it has a large and unified collection of current reference materials and enjoys a volume of use that would ensure sufficient interviews within our schedule. Incidentally, it is located in an affluent, primarily white, and library-oriented community within the boundaries of Los Angeles. In order to see beyond an affluent, primarily white community, two additional sites were later studied, representing two major ethnic groups in California: Hispanic and Vietnamese. The particular sites chosen are less affluent and their residents use their libraries relatively less frequently than the SMPL community. Interviews were conducted with fifty-seven users (ethnicity not recorded) of the reference collection at the main branch of SMPL in 1993, with forty-four Hispanic users at the Fullerton Public Library in 1995, and with thirty-six Viet- namese users at the Linda Vista branch of the San Diego Public Library in 1995.




The research used ethnographic methods, combining emic and etic elements [6] . Observation of and conversations with users prior to instrument construction permitted the development of questions with a strong user (emic) perspective; the researcher's creation of categories of response and linkages among data elements provided an external researcher (etic) perspective.

The interviews, two to five minutes long, included the following questions on the reference search and its outcomes: (1) Did you find the answer or any part of the answer? (2) Did you seek help in the search? (3) If you sought staff help, how were you helped? (4) If you had help from another user or a friend, how were you helped? (5) If you didn't have any help, how did you find what you found? (6) If you didn't ask for staff help, why not? (7) What indexes or end sources did you use? (8) Did you know about those indexes or sources before you came into the library? (9) How complete was the information found? (10) How useful is the information likely to be? and (11) If you found no information, why do you think that was the case?

The two variables Completeness of What Was Found in the Search and Usefulness of the Results comprise the definition of user success. They were drawn from Louise Su's [7] study of measures of success in online information retrieval. Her preliminary results indicated that the two measures favored by users are (1) completeness of search results and (2) value of search results. The interview also included two questions on user demographics: broad occupational category and year of study, if they were students.

The interviewers tried to stratify the sample to assure coverage of students in high school through college and adult nonstudents. Inter- viewers arbitrarily approached people who appeared to be fourteen to eighteen years old (high school age), eighteen to twenty-five (college age), and forty or older (adult nonstudent age). They approached users as they used both indexes (including the public catalog) and reference resources (for example, encyclopedias, directories, and almanacs, not indexes) and asked for an interview when the users had finished their search. The matrix in table 1 (except for the col. "10-12") guided the interviewers in approaching people, and they tried to fill the cells evenly.

The data reported here are the SMPL data, as the benchmark of the three studies - primarily because of limitations in breadth of usage patterns and in the small sample size of the two ethnic studies. The Hispanic and Vietnamese data yielded some additional perspectives to the user's search and success process - tantamount to footnotes to the SMPL study. I discuss them at the end of this article.

The types of users during the two days of interviews led to the actual




TABLE 1 DiSTmBUTiON of Interviews

10-12 14-18 Age 18-25 Total 40+

Using indexes (including public catalog) 0 2 3 9 14 6 5 Using reference resources 10 20 41

5 Total 13 29 8 55*

*In two cases age was not rcorded.

distribution of SMPL users shown in table 1. The distribution is heavily skewed toward users of reference resources, as opposed to indexes. The representation of those forty and older approximately matches those younger than twenty-five. The column "10-12" was created to accom- modate five users who turned out to be younger than the threshold of fourteen. While distribution is far from even, it does cover a range of user types, as intended.

Fifty-seven people did return to be interviewed (77 percent of the seventy-four "appropriate" people approached). Interviewers took notes and tape-recorded the sessions. All but three subjects agreed to have their sessions recorded, and the tapes were transcribed.

Findings

Data from the forms provided the foundation for analysis, and the transcribed text of the interviews embellished those data. While numbers are displayed below to show relationships, statistical tests have not been performed because of the exploratory nature of the study.

What Did They Seek? To illustrate the variety of topics inquired about, subject terms of the first ten interviews are as follows: (1) magazines and publishers' addresses; (2) civil service job descriptions; (3) books on NASD-registered dealers nationwide; (4) information on Microsoft and Merit Corpora- tion; (5) a research paper on Wallace Stevens; (6) paper on the bomb- ing of Pearl Harbor and how much FDR knew about the attack; (7) AIDS in the military; (8) names and addresses of publishers throughout the country; (9) buying a computer and looking for printers and soft- ware; and (10) Bill Clinton's first 100 days in office and his plans for education.



1 60 THE LIBRARY QUARTERLY

TABLE 2 Types of Staff Help Received

/* %

27 a. Staff told where to find resource (s) the user already knew about. 16 b. Staff told which shelves to go to or which number to look under. 5 8

17 c. Staff told which resource (s) to use, or validated the use of a particular 28 source.

d. Staff took user to the resource or had it handed to them. 22 13 8 e. Staff instructed in how to use the resource. 5

f. Staff told or showed, in the resource, the actual information wanted. 3 5

g. Staff referred user elsewhere (outside the library). 2 1

Total 60 100 * Multiple responses permitted.

How Often Did They Seek Staff Help? Searchers asked the staff for assistance in thirty-two instances (66 percent) . The rest claimed neither to have asked for nor received help of any kind from staff. No one, even among those who did not seek staff help, claimed to have received help from other library users. Three people got help from friends, always in the form of being told before going to the library about the resource they eventually used. Of the three who found nothing in their search, two asked for staff help in identifying appropriate materials, and one did not ask for help.

When They Sought Help, What Did They Receive? Thirty-two people received fifty-nine staff assists. Table 2 displays the frequencies and percentages of total assists. Although the question was not asked, per se, nothing in the study notes or transcripts indicated that any users sought staff assistance that they did not receive. Failure to get an answer to their question was almost invariably seen as a matter of resources - usually items lost or misplaced or the library not holding enough relevant reference materials or indexes. Corroborating this finding are data from my own concurrent study of reference desk performance in California: out of almost twenty-two thousand transactions, the two reasons most frequently cited by users for dissatisfaction with the reference transaction were that they did not find enough information and/ or they needed more in-depth information.

A generous interpretation of professional reference work could assume that responses b-g (73 percent of the assists) could be considered professional level. (Even b could require judgment as to the nature of the need and where the most appropriate information can be found.) The other 27 percent of the assists required locating a resource the user already knew about. If we accept the generous definition, the vast




TABLE 3 Staff Help and Completeness of Answer

Did Not Sought Seek Staff

Staff Help Help

% % Information Found Was / /

Complete 14 44 6 24 Complete, wants more 6 19 4 16 Partial 6 10 19 40

4 A beginning 13 4 16

Nothing 2 6 4 1

Total 32 101 100 25

bulk of the professional-level transactions qualify as minimum - telling where to find something - in James Wyer's [8] classic hierarchy of levels of reference service (minimum, moderate, maximum) . Only 5 percent consisted of telling or showing the actual information requested - his maximum level. A 1991 study of university students by F. W. Lancas- ter, Cheryl Elzy, and Alan Nourie [9] revealed a much higher figure, possibly attributable to their needs as students: 39.5 percent of the time staff provided users with actual answers - whether right or wrong - to their questions.

How Complete Were Their Searches'? All but three of the subjects claimed to have found all or part of what they were looking for. Fifty-four searches turned up a full or partial answer to the question. Table 3 cross-tabulates Staff Help with Com- pleteness of Answer. The category Complete, Wants More was con- structed after analyzing the transcripts, since many of the subjects were engaged in searches that had several stages. One stage might be the search for a list of potential titles, followed some time later by an attempt to find the titles and use them. For such people, the interview captured a moment in the evolution of a search. They frequently judged what they had found so far to be Complete or Very Useful, but still wanted more: more specific information at a later time; the articles themselves; literary criticism of the author whose biography they had found.

In table 3, the percentages of Complete and Partial are virtually in- verted as we move from Help to No Help. The chance of a complete answer for users was greater when they turned to staff; the chance for a partial answer was greater when they did not. I could assume that users receiving only directional help to a known source did not receive




TABLE 4 Staff Help (Minus Direction) and Completeness of Answer

Did Not Seek Sought Staff Help or

"Professional- Was Directed Only Level" Help

% % Information Found Was / /

33 Complete 8 38 12 7 Complete, wants more 19 14 3

Partial 33 4 12 19 A beginning 11 19 4 4

Nothing 3 10 2 1

Total 100 21 99 36

professional-level help. Adding to those not seeking staff help the ones who were only directed to a known resource, the numbers shift somewhat, as shown in table 4. I would expect the differences in completeness to become more pronounced - that there would be a greater difference between Complete and Partial in the two columns since we have now separated the higher-value professional interventions from the lower-value interventions and noninterventions. But the opposite occurred: the differences were diluted. There are several plausible ex- planations: (1) the differences in table 3 are not robust and users think they achieve as complete an answer on their own as when being helped by staff; (2) professional help was, in fact, delivered when the staff directed users to known resources, but the users did not report it; (3) the user is roughly accurate in predicting success in reference self- service (when the user predicts low success, help is sought, and success is improved; when predicting high success, help is not sought, and the user thinks the outcome is successful); and (4) user perception of completeness of information diminishes with professional interaction (the user perceives a greater range of relevant information that is not delivered as the result of the interaction) .

From these pilot data, it is probably most conservative to hypothesize that there is no apparent relationship between user-perceived completeness of the search and seeking staff help.

Usefulness and Staff Help There may be a relationship between seeking staff help and the perceived usefulness of the search result. Data on the companion measure of success, Usefulness, are displayed in tables 5 and 6. The data incline toward higher useful judgments by the user when staff help is sought,




TABLE 5 Staff Help and Usefulness of Answer

Did Not Sought Seek Staff

Staff Help Help

% / % Information Found Was /

72 Very useful 23 13 54 Somewhat useful, hoped to be useful 7 22 10 42 Not useful 0 0 0 0 No information found 2 6 1 4

Total 32 100 24 100

Note. - The Usefulness datum was not recorded for one case.

TABLE 6 Staff Help (Minus Direction) and Usefulness

Did Not Seek Staff

Help or Was Sought Directed

Staff Help Only

% / % / Information Found Was

73 Very useful 16 20 59 Somewhat useful, hoped to be useful 4 13 38 18 Not useful 0 0 0 0 No information found 2 1 3 9

22 100 Total 34 100

Note. - The Usefulness datum was not recorded for one case.

and that inclination does not change when the Directed Only kind of staff help is added to the Nonseeking behavior.

Finding It without Staff Help Searchers who did not ask for staff help, yet found all or part of what they were looking for, employed two major strategies: they used the library's online catalog or they knew about the resource already. Table 7 shows the distribution of answers to this question.

Three people simply persisted in looking until they found the resources they needed. One had it easy: a listing of civil service job descriptions was visible as he entered the building. "I was amazed," he said.




TABLE 7 Finding It without Staff Help

11 Knew about the resource already 41 8 Used the library's catalog 30 3 11 The resource was assigned in class

11 They just looked till they found it 3 7 2 Someone they knew told them about it 0 0 They got it from a list or guide

Total 27 100

Why They Did Not Ask As might be expected, the vast bulk of those who did not ask for help said simply that they did not see a need to ask (see table 8) . Most of them knew what they wanted, by title. Two said that it had not occurred to them to ask for help.

Of the fourteen who did not claim complete information and did not ask - including all four who felt the information found was just a beginning and three of the four who felt it was complete but wanted more - thirteen claimed that they felt no need to ask and one, that it had not occurred to him or her. As mentioned earlier, many of the searches were continuous, evolutionary activities. A search occurs in stages; many of the subjects had reached interim plateaus and had stopped for the time being, happy with what they had found (Very Useful or Somewhat/ Hopefully Useful).

None of the users elected the more introspective possibilities offered them (Embarrassing; Too Personal) , nor did they volunteer any. Tak-

TABLE8 Why I Did Not Ask

% /

Not the staff member's job 0 0 No need 16 89 Staff busy 0 0 Didn't occur to me 2 11

Embarrassing 0 0 The staff wouldn't know how to help me 0 0 The staff have failed me in the past 0 0

My question was too personal 0 0 Other 0 0

Did not find what they sought 100 18




TABLE 9 Foreknowledge and Completeness

Completeness

Complete, Knew Resource Partial Complete Wants More Beginning Before Nothing

5 8 4 Knew completely; 0 4 (19) (38) (24) (19) N=21 (0)

7 7 Knew not at all; 2 1 0 N=17 (41) (41) (6) (12) (0)

Note. - The Usefulness datum was not recorded for one case. Numbers in parentheses are percentages.

ing the data at face value, there appears to be no evidence of "information anxiety" demotivators - five factors validated on college students in 1993 by Sharon L. Bostick [10] : staff barriers, affective barriers, com- fort with the library, knowledge of the library, or mechanical barriers. Nor was there evidence that past staff failure was a reason for not asking, as was the case about one-third of the time in Mary Jane Swope and Jeffrey Katzer's 1972 study of college students [11].

Foreknowledge of Sources Users had varying degrees of foreknowledge of the resources they were using. Frequently, foreknowledge included actual previous use of the resources. As expected, substantially more people who did not seek help knew of resources beforehand than did not know of them.

Thirty-six users did not ask for assistance or received direction only. Of these, seventeen expressed firm and specific prior knowledge of resources they were using, whether indexes or reference sources, and some had actually used the resources before; twelve had partial knowledge of a resource, such as a title or an approximate title, but no experi- ence in using it (for example, the Infotrak database) or generic knowledge of a resource, such as the type of resource or index desired; five had no knowledge of a resource (four of them found their resources through the catalog and one by chance) ; and one did not use a resource of any kind (the user viewed the collection and judged the library to be too small for his needs; that person's search failed).

Relationship between Foreknowledge, Completeness, and Usefulness To explore the relationship of foreknowledge to success of outcome, tables 9 and 10 compare users who were most knowledgeable and least knowledgeable about the resource, in terms of Completeness and Use- fulness of the information found. Those with no foreknowledge achieved about the same rate of Complete and Complete, Wants More,




TABLE 10 Foreknowledge and Usefulness

Somewhat Useful/ Not Useful Very Useful Knew Resource Before Hopefully Useful

Knew completely; N - 20 0 15 5 (75) (0) (25)

Knew not at all; N = 17 6 0 11 (35) (0) (65)

Note. - The Usefulness datum was not recorded for one case. Numbers in parentheses are percentages.

answers. They achieved more Partial answers, but fewer Beginning answers, than those with total foreknowledge. However, comparing the two groups with regard to usefulness, no dramatic differences appear. Those who Knew Completely were more likely to claim their searches Very Useful; but this difference could be spurious, given the small sample size.

Reasons for Using the Reference Collection Subjects were asked why they were seeking information - for school, business, or personal reasons. The distribution is: (1) school (reasons related to doing formal course work), twenty-four people; (2) work (related to performing in the job they now hold), thirteen; and (3) personal (all other, including seeking new jobs), twenty. Six of the inquiries (10 percent) were directly related to job seeking.

The twenty-four students fell into the following categories, evidenc- ing a range of student levels: grade six through nine, five people; grades ten through twelve, seven; college undergraduate, ten; and graduate school, two. There was no apparent relationship between reason for the search or student status and any other key variable of the study - neither Completeness of the information retrieved, Usefulness, Fore- knowledge of a resource, nor Seeking Staff Help.

A concern among many librarians is the extent to which users' questions are driven by "serious," as opposed to "casual," needs. To test the issue we evaluated the searches qualitatively, defining as serious a search for information that is utilitarian - to be applied in work or school tasks or in solving nonrecreational situations of everyday life - and as casual a search for information without such application. By these definitions, I judged only two inquiries to be possibly casual: an interest in train disasters from 1943-49; and information about the American folk classic "Shenandoah." They were stated as personal needs and not related to an application in the user's life. However, the "casual" judgment is fragile. The interviews may simply not have




caught the application of the information sought - such as writing a feature article on trains or introducing the performance of the song at a concert. " Serious" searches also illustrate the fragility of the casual/ serious judgment. For instance, a search for famous golfers would probably have been judged casual, had the user not expressed a utilitarian objective (job assignment) .

Problem Points in Reference Service To the questions "What additional information would you like?" and "Why do you think the information you want hasn't been found so far?" there emerged few problems with the library's arrangement, the resources they used, or the service staff. It is interesting that the types of problems did not differ between the self-service users and the ones who asked for assistance. The majority of problems mentioned fell into three categories, largely related to resources thought not to be available in either the reference or the circulating collections: (1) the library does not own the titles or indexes I need (such as an index in a special- ized field, a catalog of women's studies programs, or a title that is in- dexed in Magazine Index but not owned by the library); (2) the titles or issues I need are misplaced or lost; and (3) the resource I need either does not exist or an existing resource is inadequate (for example, the source does not list very small companies or the syndetics - links among terms - in the Infotrak database are insufficient) .

Possible Improvements through Additional Intervention In 1985, Martha Kirby and Naomi Miller found that, when trained searchers redid a user's Medline search, 60 percent of the students deemed the results better than their own [12] . In the present situation, could further exploitation of local collections or use of existing links with other libraries, by library staff, have improved the quality of the information user's success?

Again, qualitative analysis by the principal investigator indicates that, for twenty-two users (39 percent), additional staff help might have improved the information retrieved.

This count includes users who asked for staff help and those who did not, and those who had reached various stages of closure on their inquiry. It also includes users who expressed various degrees of satisfac- tion, as long as they expressed the desire for additional information on their stated topic. Users who were fully satisfied with Usefulness and Completeness were not included in the count; nor were those who were caught midstream by the interviewer and were clearly in contact with the staff (such as a job seeker who wanted statistics on California coun- ties and was being guided by staff) .




The ' 'improving" interventions are of four types: (1) internal follow- through by staff, to make sure that all the relevant materials held by the library are utilized; (2) interlibrary loan; (3) interlibrary reference; and (4) referral of the user.

In terms of staff effort, referral of the user could be the easiest intervention, if we define it, drawing on George S. Hawley's [13] definition, as the act of directing a user to, or putting a user under the control of, another person. It could be as simple an act as naming and locating another person for the user. Yet it was invoked only twice in the fifty- seven cases. Hawley's research among academic and public librarians indicates that the factors related to the referral act are many and inter- related, and this may explain the infrequency of referring at the SMPL site. Outcomes might have benefited from referral of the user to an appropriate library in all twenty-two of the improvable cases.

Outcomes might have been improved through follow-through within the library in cases when the user did not ask for help or asked only for direction to known resources - for example, in the relatively un- complicated searches for descriptions of early films, information on companies that do marketing, articles on communications, and information about famous golfers.

Outcomes might have been improved through interlibrary loan when items found in indexes were not available locally (articles on veg- etarianism found in the Infotrak databases that were not in the library) ; when owned materials were lost (a book on real estate law firms, or the books on marijuana) ; or when materials needed were more exotic than the local library would be expected to hold (essay-type material on Carlos Fuentes, laws on the use of halon, or detailed histories of European and U.S. movie houses).

Outcomes might have been improved through the existing interlibrary reference network in the cases of those seeking short but not necessarily easy answers, such as the format of an Argentinean birth certificate, information on Merit Corporation (a local publisher) , information on Clinton's education initiatives during his first one hun- dred days in office, or the names of foundations that fund educational activities in the Stockton area.

Improvement interventions must, of course, be mutual. Both staff member and user must agree to pursue them. In fifteen of the twenty- two "improvable" cases, users did not seek staff help or received only direction to a foreknown resource, perhaps in blissful ignorance of other service possibilities. Nonetheless, the others who had "professional" contact with staff seem not to have been offered the additional interventions - possibly due to staff time constraints, staff unwilling- ness to offer additional interventions, or user reluctance to pursue the question.




The Hispanic and Vietnamese Studies

The original study instrument was translated to, and back-translated from, Spanish and Vietnamese, and appropriately fluent interviewers were hired and trained to conduct the studies in either English or the native language of the subject. Only seven interviews were actually conducted in the native language.

The three study samples were heterogeneous in more than ethnicity. To a great degree in the Vietnamese sample and a lesser degree in the Hispanic, more of the questions were driven by school assignments than by work or personal need. In both samples, people using the reference materials for personal or work reasons were relatively rare, and the attempt to balance the ages and motivations of the samples led to many hours of waiting. It took an average of twenty-five minutes to identify an apt subject, secure the subject's agreement to be interviewed, and conduct an interview at SMPL, but an average of one hour for the Hispanic and two hours for the Vietnamese samples - due solely to the low incidence of bona fide subjects. Even by logging many more hours waiting for subjects in the Hispanic and Vietnamese sites, we failed to balance these users even approximately.

As a result, patterns of usage were noticeably different. In the Viet- namese sample, the great majority were doing relatively open subject searches for book-type circulating material, mostly for school assignments, such as "a paper about an author," a paper on ' 'missions of California," or "a paper on solar energy." In these cases the only reference activity was the use of the library's electronic catalog. They seemed naturally to turn to the online public catalog, rather than the staff -

perhaps because of conditioning through previous school assignments. And they often found desirable items that were held by another branch or were in circulation, and thus failed in their searches more often than the other samples. This same pattern of a relatively open subject search and failure to find the materials on the shelf was also witnessed to a large extent in the Hispanic sample - but seldom in the SMPL sample. Other than this gross difference, the patterns of usage of the three samples were largely similar.

Conclusions

This picture of reference use is a snapshot of a fluid process - a search that often moves through several stages, reforms itself at each stage, and uses library services in both mediated and unmediated modes. At a broad level, the studies reaffirm much of the research of Brenda Der- vin and various co-authors since 1976 [14] and Carol Kuhlthau's more




recent findings [15], both of which model the search for information as dynamic and sequential, with a life cycle that often consists of evolv- ing objectives and strategies and several search-and-adjustment loops. This study captured users at one point in time, and many of them were clearly at one stage of moving through a problem or situation. The user's definition of information need, feelings and attitudes about information, and approaches to information seeking were likely to change as the situation evolved. Many of our users had reached a point of reflection and assessment of the found information that had been discovered prior to redefining their need and establishing a new search.

At a finer level, drawing mainly from the SMPL data with reinforce- ment from the Hispanic and Vietnamese studies, we have a set of relationships among user claims - an incipient model - that requires testing.

White [3] found that 74 percent of those using the library's reference services tried to solve the reference problem themselves. The figure in the SMPL study is 61 percent - a difference perhaps attributable to chance, given the small size of our sample.

Most staff assists held opportunities for truly professional-level responses: identifying resources for the user, telling or showing the actual information sought, instructing in the use of resources, and referring to internal or external sources. A small minority consisted of simple direction to an already known source. However, in the professional- level responses, "telling or showing" the actual information figured small; most interactions with staff got the user a "minimal" level of service.

The instances of not asking for help or asking only for help in locating a known item prompt hypotheses about patterns of using reference collections and staff:

1. There is no clear difference in the perceived completeness of the results when comparing those who receive professional-level reference service and those who do not. This could be due to self-selec- tion: those who need the help are indeed the ones who ask for it, in order to reach a self-defined level of success.

2. There is some difference in the usefulness of the results of the search. To some extent, those who receive professional help find the information more useful for several possible reasons: They at- tach added utility to a professionally aided result; they seek help more often on important questions and thus judge any result as useful; or they actually receive more useful results with professional help.




3. The reasons for seeking information do not influence the success of the search.

4. By and large, users who do not ask at the reference desk know one or more reference resources with the information they need, or feel they know how to use the indexes to find the information. This is no surprise. The library profession has hoped that it worked this way. What is surprising is that no negatives were given: there was no mention that the staff did not know or that the staff had failed in the past. True, it may have been difficult for some people to confess such feelings while sitting in the library talking to perhaps a library spy, but the data are preliminary evidence that not asking at the reference desk is due more to the absence of felt need than to a prior service failure.

5. People who do not ask tend to compensate by doing title searches to locate things they already know about, or they already know where they are located, from previous exposure. If they use the catalog, they do title searches, not subject searches, to lead them to reference or circulating sources. However, students working on paper assignments do use the library catalog for subject searches, largely without asking for help, and fail because the resource they locate is out or located in another library.

6. There is no relationship between foreknowledge of a source and the perceived completeness or usefulness of the information.

7. Searches are overwhelmingly driven by "serious" rather than "casual" interests - school assignments, job assignments, and problem solving in life (job seeking, buying a computer, selecting a college, and so on).

By and large, users from all three ethnic groups see their mediated, semimediated, and unmediated reference use as successful. The users know which resource - index or end-reference resource - will help them and, with the exception of the Vietnamese and Hispanic users searching for books on broad subjects, are successful in getting it.

Notwithstanding the users' claim of success, staff help could have improved answers. Additional staff interventions - especially, interventions related to linking the user to outside resources through interlibrary loan or interlibrary reference - could lead to better answers. Fur- thermore, at no time did the user or staff member, as reported by the user, mention reference referral or interlibrary loan, and referral of the user (as opposed to the question) was mentioned only twice.

At a broad level, the studies suggest that users often do not approach a reference desk, and many users who could benefit from professional contact feel they know the best resource and sense no lack of informa-




don or lack of search success. We are left with the nagging thoughts - or budding research questions - that many users fix on a given resource, not knowing that there may be alternative or better sources of information; that they do not know how to distinguish good search results from bad or good information from bad; and that sometimes, especially with assignments, they do not evaluate the quality of the information retrieved, as long as they get something. Such questions point to the need for research on how the user conceives the search process, views the resource options, knows and values staff interventions, evaluates search quality, and evaluates the contribution of the information retrieved to his or her need - and how ethnic background influences these many perceptions.

REFERENCES

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15. Ruhlthau, Carol Collier. Seeking Meaning: A Process Approach to Library and Information Ser- vices. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1993.



Documents

Using Public Library Reference Collections and Staff