More than half of American adults (90 million people) are considered to have low health literacy. Combined with the facts that medical information isn’t written for a lay person, that we’re being increasingly tasked with monitoring our own health and often those of our loved ones, and availability of prescription drugs has increased, navigating consumer health information can be overwhelming. Particularly for those who aren’t native English speakers, accessing, evaluating, and understanding health information can be a challenge. Also, health information is filled with jargon, and patients are often intimidated by doctors, which is often similar to customers’ experience with libraries: as such, librarians should follow these tips when answering health questions:

1. Be approachable – be alert, stand, greet patrons.
2. Listen – Allow patrons to fully state their needs; ask “What do you need?”
3. Searching – Show materials as you find it. “Do you have time now? If not, let’s schedule an appointment.” Set them at ease: “This is new for me, too. Let’s learn this new topic together.”
4. Follow up – Check in with the patron. “Was this enough information?”

Most importantly, stress that you’re there to help.

Also, for any health question, she suggests starting with Medline Plus (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/).

She’ll also make her slides available online, so I’ll post the link when she sends it to me.

I may be putting words in their mouths, but these are the messages that I perceived during the mostly optimistic program.

The printed reference book is not dying; it is simply shape-shifting to digital materials. Scholastic and Grolier are going strictly online with some of their titles. Some investment publications are dropping print. (This latter point needs to be double checked and reported on more fully.)

Reference sources in PDF format are difficult to use. Avoid these if possible.

Print directories are unnecessary, a luxury that few can afford. Even the revered Encyclopedia of Associations just sits now that people can find organizations quickly through the Internet.

Many reference items can move to the circulating collection. They just sit in reference and may gain new life if borrowed. Tyckoson has not physically moved the reference books to circulating but almost anything may be borrowed. When offering reference books, he has even said “How long would you like it?”

There are many reference volumes that cost a fortune to acquire that are mostly useless now. Getting rid of them is a political and environmental problem. Better World Books will take many items, but think of the end users before you send them out-of-date materials.

The need for reference services is as strong as ever, especially with the bewildering maze of information available through the Internet. Library vetted resources can help immensely.

The value of the library can not be measured with the same benchmarks as in the past, as some of its services in the online world are indirect.

Just putting links to databases on library websites is not enough to get clients to use them. There has to be marketing, including the example of the reference librarians. Johns recommended creating widgets that let clients search databases from their own iGoogle webpages.

Polanka recommended Booklist’s new blog Points of Reference which will deal with many of these issues in the coming months.

• What ARE the expectations of a librarian? The group agreed that it’s not enough to only be good at “reference”–it goes further than that. Even in an academic setting, librarians can no longer be strong in only one arena of librarianship.
• Librarians should take leadership roles within the school/community they serve. In turn, this makes the library’s role (as well as the librarian’s role) in the community more visible and potentially viewed as valuable.
• What is a “bar” for librarians to meet or exceed? Should there be such a thing? This brought about some lively discussion.
• Attitude–can it be quantified? Does it have to be? Attitude was mentioned as a way of evaluating librarians.
• What are ways in which librarians can be evaluated? Peer, “secret shoppers”, supervisor only, written evaluations, self-evaluations were all mentioned as possibilities.
• We discussed a couple ways to get buy-in on new technological advances: Use early-adopters of technology to be the prophet to the rest of a (jaded?) staff; put nay-sayers on committees with early-adopters.
• How do paraprofessionals come into play? What is the break-point between what a para can answer vs. what a professional can answer? This is an age-old question that still has some librarians disagreeing.
• Is mandatory involvement the way to go, in terms of getting staff to contribute to new technologies, new ideas, etc.?

Stephen presented first, and gave a really nice comprehensive overview defining social networking, the difference between social networking (connecting and building relationships with other people) and social media (the sharing of objects with other people in a social way). Some of the social networking use examples he presented were very practical and successfully functional, such as using a meebo me chat box on the “Ask a question” page of the library site, or creating a Facebook Page for a library. Also of note is that librarians are starting to post home-grown profile pages on their library web sites, giving students a better sense of who the librarian is and what kinds of specializations they cover, as well as profiles that advertise a librarian’s availability on Facebook.

However, there was also something oddly disturbing that Stephen pointed out. He cited two librarians who have tried to perform “outreach” on Facebook by searching for students with their school affiliations and sending out mass messages to these people using Facebook’s built in messaging system. Their messages were perceived as spam (which is, essentially, true), and their accounts were shut down. However, instead of finding different ways to outreach do outreach on Facebook, they continued to work to beat the system. Not only is this behavior deplorable — purposely trying to get around Facebook’s rules for sending messages (the Inbox, Messages and Pokes help section states that if someone is not your friend, you can only message them individually, after negative experiences with past open messaging policies) to spam users, even if it’s for a benevolent cause — it’s very anti-culture for Facebook, and really kinda makes librarians look bad. One of many interesting reports on how Facebook users interact with messages is available through the HP site.

Beth Evans reported that she had great success using MySpace with students at Brooklyn College. The library has 4,000 friends on my MySpace, and they’ve been able to successfully market services and events through the online service. The library encourages everyone to “friend” them on Facebook, which I believe to be a double-edged sword. Beth noted that the reason that students say they don’t expect to see libraries in social networking spaces in OCLC report Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World, she believes that it might be because “it may not occur to them that we have something to offer,” which I think might be an interesting discussion to have, especially with public librarians.

David Lankes tied all of the presentations together while offering food for thought at the same time. His presentation about his work on participatory reference at Syracuse was truly scintillating stuff, and is definitely worth a listen. His statement, to paraphrase a little, that knowledge is created through conversation, and libraries, being in the knowledge business, are in the conversation business, seems very natural and innovative at the same time. Reference transactions should be conversations with the patron as well as any other human or digital resources at your disposal, instead of isolated Q & A sessions, which seems a bit obvious to me (doesn’t everyone bring all of their people and resources into the process?), but it may be that not everyone does reference this way. What’s truly innovative is the Scapes vaporware (conceptual software that only exists as concept) application that he’s developing to track this very collaborative reference process. That, and while ownership of space online is OK, we’ve been “too busy chasing Amazon and Google that we’re not really figuring out whether or not we’re in the same space” competitively. As librarians, you shouldn’t “define your mission by cool features, do it by core principles,” thinking carefully about how and why people use these online spaces. We need to stop chasing all of the innovators and making second-hand copies of everything, and really create something innovative to meet our patrons needs.

So yes, social software (an umbrella for social networking + social media) can create a collaborative environment in which reference questions can be answered. However, librarians need to take care in applying these applications, and, even better, should begin to really spearhead new ways and technologies in the area.

This question is inspired by a message I read in the April 25 (Vol 25, Issue 26) digest of the WebJunction Publib listserv:

Hello,
I am a library student with a question for reference librarians. My reference class is evaluating different resources, and I am wondering what your “Top 5″ are – which general reference books you consider invaluable and are most used by your reference staff. Also, are there any that your library purchases regularly but which are very rarely used?
Thank you so much in advance for your responses!

The message is from Kathy (Brown) Gregory, a library school student in her second semester at Southern Connecticut State University who works at Hartford Public Library. The original assignment, for her Reference Materials and Service class, is really quite interesting and nifty: subscribe to a library listserv, post a question, and record your responses. It’s an excellent opportunity for students to realize that listservs are a resource for reaching out to the library community, and an interesting way to examine how responsive and active some lists actually are.

There were several responses from the listserv, published in the very same digest, that also proved interesting. Favorite print resources included: almanacs, ValueLine, Morningstar, town histories/reports/stuff, state laws, atlases and maps (especially local), dictionaries, guides to grants, and self-help law, to name a few.

Two things happened: 1) I wanted to help Kathy obtain more data, and 2) I got really, really curious. In a day and age of electronic resources, what print resources are considered “favorite children,” near and dear to the hearts of public librarians who can’t live without them?

We want to know! Tell us what your fave 5 print resources are by replying to this post. We’ll send the information on to Kathy, who can use it in her report.

Today’s highlight is the Butterball TurkeyTalk Podcast. In the past, Butterball has offered a hotline as well as online resources to help people out with their big bird roasting issues. To help people get a jump start on planning, Butterball has started a weekly podcast (6 episodes total) to help with Thanksgiving and December holiday planning.

Each episode will give you a quick, step-by-step lesson on essential turkey and holiday planning tips with the Butterball 5-Minute Lesson. This week, Mary begins with party prep ideas and tips for getting “holiday ready.” Then Sherleen walks you through the basics for cooking the perfect turkey.

This is a great podcast to add to your weekly library newsletter, talk up word-of-mouth to your patrons, add as a flyer to your display of Thanksgiving cookbooks and cooking magazines, or somehow otherwise highlight. The real URL is long and cumbersome, so feel free to use this TinyURL instead, which will point to the real page: http://tinyurl.com/jgynk.

As with most other podcasts, you can either click on the link to the episode and listen to the sound file on your computer, or you can subscribe to the feed to receive the podcast through a news aggregator or podcatcher.