This presentation was provided by Chris Strauber of Boston College during the NISO webinar, The Evolving Natures of Reference Work and Reference Product, held on February 7, 2018.

1. Reference Sources
A User Perspective
Chris Strauber, Boston College Libraries, 2018-02-07

3. Goals for This Talk
● Discuss the purpose and audience of a reference collection
● Identify some challenges to broader use of current academic reference
sources
● Discuss some examples of approaches which work

4. The Reference Collection
Has two main audiences: Patrons and librarians
Provides:
● Factual and introductory information on a range of topics
● In a central location
● In a way available to everyone all the time

6. Why Wikipedia Works
● Freely available (optional)
● Findable
● Shareable/linkable
● Usable on any device

7. Laws of the Web
1. It needs to be findable using common search tools
2. It needs to be easy to share a usable link
3. It needs to be usable on any device with web access

8. Analog Comparison
Oxford English Dictionary
● Findable (huge, centrally located)
● Shareable (“OED, q.v. ferret”)
● Usable by anyone who speaks English

9. A Book Is Not A Book
● Novel
● Dictionary
● Companion
● General encyclopedia
● Scholarly encyclopedia

10. Academic Reference: Common Problems
● Print-based thinking
● Journal-based thinking

11. Print-Based Thinking

12. Journal-Based Thinking

14. My preferred office setup

15. Digital Inequality

16. Designing for Desktop Size

17. Desktop design

18. Desktop design type 2

19. Why Am I Fixating on Phones?
● Phone-sized is better for some kinds of reference material
● Designing for phones does much of the work of designing for lots of
other formats.

20. Discovery
● Find the OED at your library. I’ll wait.
● Discovery layers are confusing

21. Sharing and Linking
● Proxy server access is a usability nightmare
○ Pre-proxied links work well for linking for one institution
○ Off-campus use is normal
● This is not an education problem

22. Spotify for Scholarly Content
● Oh, wait, that’s Sci Hub
● But Napster came before Spotify

23. Good Examples
● Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
● Merriam-Webster and Collins Dictionaries

24. Restatement of my position
● Reference sources are natural tools for the web
● Reference sources solve real research problems
● Many current academic reference sources are on the web rather than of
the web.

25. Contact Information
Chris Strauber
Senior Research Librarian/Bibliographer for Classics, Philosophy, and
Theology
Boston College, O’Neill Library
chris.strauber@bc.edu
@cstrauber

26. Questions?