2017 Charleston Library Conference

“The discoverability of reference resources is likely to be an ever-evolving challenge for users, librarians, and publishers.” Navigating Research: How academic users understand, discover, and utilize reference resources. Oxford University Press, June 2017, p. 17.

Last June, Oxford University Press released Navigating Research, a white paper on how academic librarians and library users view reference sources. This program will discuss the findings of that research from the perspective of a major reference publisher and a practicing academic librarian.

Simon Pawley (Market Research Department at Oxford University Press) will outline findings from the research project to explore users’ and librarians’ perspectives on the role of reference resources in research and teaching in today’s academic institutions. Based on a survey of 164 librarians and in-depth interviews with 16 librarians and 18 end-users, the report examines the role of scholarly reference in providing guidance to new topics and the scholarship relating to them, as well as assessing the factors affecting the utilization of reference resources.

David Tyckoson (Reference Librarian, California State University, Fresno) will offer a response to the research findings and discuss how they relate to patterns of usage of reference resources in his library. He will present data on the usage of reference resources in his collection that demonstrate the rise (and fall) of different kinds of reference sources. That data confirms many of the findings included in the report.

Both speakers will reflect on the findings of the report and their implications for the future. The session invites a discussion of how librarians and publishers can work to improve users’ awareness and utilization of scholarly reference resources.