This poster will discuss the ethical concerns with the processing, digitizing, and organizing of the Pacific Library Partnership’s System Reference Center (SRC) reference question archive, which contains material artifacts of complex reference questions from 1972-2004.
Reference services, a core librarian responsibility, centers on connecting users with answers, materials, and the information that will satisfy their research needs. With the proliferation of online materials and ubiquity of search engines, the nature of reference services has changed dramatically over the last decades.
The archive is comprised of questions submitted for reference librarian review by other reference librarians who had exhausted local resources and capabilities. Thus, these questions offer a unique perspective on the nature of the questions that required expert searchers with extensive resources. Included in this collection’s documentation are the originating librarian-patron consultation and SRC librarian answer, providing a detailed view of the intellectual approach and type(s) and quantity of resources consulted.
This poster will consider the privacy concerns for this particular archive, reference services, and librarians
