That was the question on everyone’s lips at Saturday afternoon’s Hot Topics in Frontline Reference discussion. Dave Tyckoson (Reference Department Head at the Henry Madden Library at California State University, Fresno) kicked off the discussion with points from his recent article “Facts Only: Are Print Collections Still Relevent?” (Against the Grain, Sept. 2004) His argument is that print collections are no longer used by the majority of our users. This spurred a heated debate over the usefulness of print resources versus their electronic equivalents (primarily subscription databases.) Then, too, came the more disturbing suggestion– not that users are choosing databases over print materials, but that they are in fact skipping both in favor of… Google!

This became the ultimate topic of discussion– what we as librarians should do about our users preference for free Internet sources over the more reliable (but oftentimes less accessible) sources that we can offer them? Do we need to work harder at training our users to utilize print and paid sources or should we be retraining ourselves and changing the formats of our sources to imitate the Google-like services that they currently use? Moreover, have we become sentimental over print resources, clinging to our books when we should be throwing them over for the electronic versions? The questions came hard and fast for the rest of the hour– the answers still seem to hover just out of reach, I think.

There was, however, a note of optimism at the end of the meeting, when one librarian suggested (and many of us confirmed) that the advent of Google, while cutting back on our ready-reference demands, has positively impacted reference services by putting us in a pinch-hitter position. Our value goes up, it was argued, because users now come to us not with quick questions, but with complicated ones that they themselves can not answer. We are indeed evolving into research consultants. I kind of like that idea, don’t you?

Also mentioned at the beginning of the meeting: RUSA’s Hot Topics committee will be looking for volunteers in the summertime. Keep an eye on the RUSA homepage for that announcement!