Melissa Wong and Laura Saunders

Steve Thomas: Melissa and Laura, welcome back to the podcast.

Melissa Wong: Thank you so much for having us. It’s great to be back.

Steve Thomas: I don’t think we talked about this in the previous times you were on, how you all got involved in the library profession in the first place and what drew you to educating new librarians as what you wanted to do as your career?

Melissa Wong: Okay, I can start. So I got into libraries as an undergraduate. I was a senior and about to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in English, which of course brings up questions of what are you going to do to earn a living? And I happened to work for the Writing Center, which had some evening hours in the library supporting students.

And through that, I got to know two librarians who really ended up inspiring me to become an academic librarian. So I went to library school. I worked at the University of Southern California for a number of years. And then I had changed jobs. I was the library director at a small college. And I got a job working as an adjunct at the University of Illinois in their iSchool, and I was just teaching one course a semester, kind of for fun and a little extra income, and I really loved it and at a certain point decided that I wanted to spend more of my time teaching, and so I left my job as a library director and have been mostly teaching for the University of Illinois ever since.

Laura Saunders: Great. And for my part, I was also an English major undergrad. I know, unusual for a librarian, but I went through undergrad focused on the idea that I was going to be a high school English teacher. And when I started a master’s program and started doing some student teaching, I found I liked teaching a lot, but I wasn’t sure if high school was the right situation for me. I wasn’t sure if I liked some of the other things that sort of surrounded the public school curricular issues and things like that. It didn’t seem like it was a good fit, so I took some time off.

I was working and trying to explore other ideas, and a friend of mine actually gave me the idea of librarianship and so I started volunteering in a library, and even just volunteering, reshelving books at night after work, I kind of knew right away. I was like, “Yes, this feels right. This seems like the right kind of environment.”

So I quit my job, I applied to library school, and then just as I was going to be starting library school, a position opened up at the public library where I was working, so I applied for that and started working as a circulation assistant, and then after about a year, I moved into an academic library position. I was managing a small special collection and doing reference and instruction. And the sort of switch into teaching you know, and in some ways it kind of was coming full circle because like I said, I always loved education and teaching. Just around the time that I was having my first child, Simmons was launching their first PhD program. And so it seemed like good timing to think about, you know, “Is this something that I wanted to do?” so I started the PhD program, and the rest is history, as they say. I was working as an adjunct while I was going through the program, found that again, I really loved teaching. I loved working with sort of emerging librarians. And luckily, I was able to get a faculty position when I finished the PhD program.

Steve Thomas: Very cool. The book that we’re talking about today is the textbook for library school students Reference and Information Services. Before we get started talking about the book itself, do you approach writing or editing a textbook different than a way that you would any other writing manuscript or any other kind of writing? How do you come at it differently, from like a writing and editing perspective?

Melissa Wong: Laura, do you want to start with this one?

Laura Saunders: Well, I was going to say, I think I came into this project as a chapter author in the fifth edition and only as a co-editor in the sixth edition. So, Melissa actually has more experience with this particular project. So, maybe if you want to start and then I can add in.

Melissa Wong: Yeah, so thinking about this as a textbook, I find that I always need to keep that audience of library school students in mind. And part of that then is thinking about what students might know coming into a course or into reading the textbook and then what they don’t know and making sure that we explicitly explain a lot of concepts that I find many librarians are so familiar with they don’t even realize they have that background knowledge. And in fact, I think this is one of the things that we sometimes work with our chapter authors on is finding that right tone for a library school student. And as people work on manuscripts for chapters, I find that we are often sending feedback, like, “Please explain this concept. Please define this term. Students do not know what this means.” And so you’re just always thinking about that very kind of intro level reader there.

Laura Saunders: Yeah, I think that probably is the most important thing. And then I think, just working, we’re both authors and editors in this textbook, but I think the editing role is quite different when you’re working with a number of chapter authors. And what do we have, about 20, maybe, chapter authors?

Melissa Wong: Yeah.

Laura Saunders: It’s just, it is that matter of, like Melissa said, kind of not only helping them to think about who their audience is and making sure that they’re writing for that audience but also just kind of making sure that there is some coherence to the entire project across the various chapters and things like that.

Melissa Wong: I think there’s a balancing act between wanting those individual voices to come through, especially because our chapter authors bring a lot of expertise in those very narrow areas that they’re writing about, and as Laura says, at the same time, wanting it to feel like a cohesive textbook that as students are reading through it, you’re getting some similar vocabulary, concepts might be building on one another. And that’s an interesting writing or maybe editing task to me as well.

Steve Thomas: And I know, so speaking from the content side only, I know there’s probably business reasons and economic reasons for doing a new edition every so often, but from your point of view, what triggers, “Okay, it’s time for a new edition.” I mean, besides Jessica, the editor saying, “Hey, time for a new edition.” or like once you’re assigned it or once you’re thinking about it, how do you know the field has changed enough?

Laura Saunders: Yeah, well, I think with this particular textbook it has been sort of historically more or less on a 4 year revision cycle, and I think again, for this particular textbook, that makes some sense. The textbook is broken up into several sections, but one really large section is devoted to the resources, ready reference sources and business sources and so on. And those do change frequently, right? And so any longer time frame would really be too much.

In fact, we had the interesting experience. I don’t know, Melissa, if you might be thinking of the same thing that just in between the time that our business chapter author sent us the final edits and we got the page proofs, I think it was, a number of the resources had changed either names or URLs or whatever. I think business is maybe an extreme example, but it just goes to show that if we don’t have this updated on a fairly regular basis, then the students are getting information that is out of date and even for the other sections, areas like the reference interview and things like that, things change, right? The codes of ethics are updated, the RUSA guidelines are updated and things like that. New theories come out. And so I think four years or so seems like a good cycle, but again, Melissa, you’ve been working on this longer than I have, so you might have some additional thoughts.

Melissa Wong: I would agree. I feel like it’s that second half with the resources chapters that really pushes “it’s time for a new edition” because things change so rapidly in that area of online resources. But it is interesting to me because then I go back to the first half of the book, which is a lot more theory, and I always realize there’s a lot to update there as well.

I will say too, I find that because I use this textbook in class, I teach a course on reference so I teach with this book all the time, and the further we get out from that publication date, the more I find myself saying to students, “Oh, this database name has changed, or I’m going to supplement this week’s reading with a new code of ethics or a new list of databases.”

So I do feel like by the time we’re working on a new edition, it is really time. In fact, I always find myself taking that information I’m learning from our authors as they revise and feeding it back into my classes so that I know that they’re getting the most current information.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, so you’re one of those professors when the students come in and they go, “Oh, no, I have the person who wrote the book as my teacher. I can’t complain about the book!”

Melissa Wong: It’s funny because sometimes they’re really excited. And then sometimes I think it doesn’t really quite click for them. And once in a while, I’m like, I had a student one time asked me something in class, and I couldn’t quite interpret the way the question was being asked, but it was about something in a chapter that I had authored, and I finally said, “You know I wrote that, right?” and they were, they were like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I do know. I just had this question!” So that part is always a little fun too.

Steve Thomas: And then obviously the field and the world changes, like this was obviously a big one because you went from pre-pandemic edition to post-pandemic edition, and just the conversations have changed, like, I think there’s more emphasis on DEI issues, and there’s more about book challenges and things like that, because that’s kind of in the culture, so that’s something I think that needs to get updated over time as well, the cultural conversation changes around libraries.

Melissa Wong: Laura, do you want to talk about the chapter that we added for this edition about the challenges of just doing reference work?

Laura Saunders: Sure. So actually, this was Melissa’s idea to add on a new chapter on challenges in reference service. And it was coming out of, as you said, both looking at the cultural conversation and recognizing the challenges that people out in the field were facing, so sort of these broader issues that were coming, maybe externally on things like book challenges or dealing with Covid and policies around Covid, but then also what you might think of as more sort of internal or organizational challenges around say, microaggressions in the workplace, or just general, like, mental health and wellness issues.

So we pulled together this new chapter that tries to walk students through because one of the things I think that we also recognize is that students come to library school, mostly excited and kind of starry eyed, which is great, and, you know, one of the things that we talked about is how do we help them to understand that there are definitely going to be challenges without making them feel completely discouraged, right? And I think that that was the point of this chapter is helping them to recognize the reality that regardless of what area of the field they go into, they are going to be facing some sorts of external and internal challenges, but then also part of the focus of the chapter is to think through what are some of the ways that both as an individual professional but then maybe also is in a larger sort of organizational perspective, what are some of the ways that we can try to minimize those challenges or overcome the challenges?

Steve Thomas: For people, again, like me, who have been in the field for a long time, do you have specific areas of the book that you think practicing librarians would get the most out of reading, something that’s changed over the decades, maybe, that they might want to tap into this book and refresh their knowledge?

Laura Saunders: Obviously, depending on what aspects of the field they’re working in, some of the source chapters might be good updates. Other than that, I do think the ethics chapter, even though the codes that we draw on tend to remain pretty stable over time, I think that that chapter, I don’t know, every time I read it, I feel like I get something new out of it.

And then, of course, ALA has updated their ethics fairly recently, and so I think that that chapter is always a useful one to revisit. Obviously, the new chapter that we added on challenges and realities, I think, could be useful to anyone, maybe especially a new career professional but I think also even people who have been in the field for a while, because it might just kind of help to think through, like, “How do I think about the challenges that I’m facing and what are some of the steps that I might be able to take?”

Melissa Wong: Mm hmm. I really love Amy Pattee’s chapter on services for children. It is not an area that I practice in, and every time I read that chapter, I feel like I take something away from it that helps me think about both services for young people in the library and also just what does good service look like in general?

I think similar, Laura, to what you were saying about the ethics chapter. Every time you read it, you come away with something to think about that’s really helpful. I also really always I really appreciate Amy VanScoy’s final chapter in the book, which is about looking ahead to your career as a professional, how you shape your career, how you engage in continuous learning as a librarian. And again, it feels like something that I’ve been doing for years. It’s something I talk to my students about. And yet every time I read that chapter, I get some new ideas or new inspiration for thinking about my own career trajectory.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. And speaking of looking forward, how do you see reference services themselves continuing to change into the future? What trends are you seeing that are accelerating in the field? Or decelerating even?

Melissa Wong: So for me, I see a couple of things. One would be what feels like a divestment in libraries, perhaps particularly in public libraries. And, you know, part of that are things like book challenges, but also just feeling like some of that financial support from communities is eroding. And then what does that mean for the work we’re doing at the reference desk and in a lot of areas in our library, right? Although I tend to think about reference first and foremost in my own work. So that is a huge challenge. How do we kind of build up and maintain that public support for the important work that libraries do in our communities?

And we see the same thing happening in school libraries. We see it happening in academic libraries. I’m sure we’ve all seen the news of a university that laid off all of its librarians. What does that mean then, not only for the library, but for the entire university, for their students, for their researchers?

 So that to me is one of the pressing issues happening in the field right now. The other issue I think is really important is generative artificial intelligence and what that means for how people go about information seeking even how we think about the legitimacy of information. It just brings up so many questions for the work that we do.

Laura Saunders: I would agree with everything that Melissa said. From my research and teaching perspectives, two of the areas that I think are impacting us a lot are intellectual freedom. So, the book challenges but also the way that those challenges have kind of metastasized. So it’s not just about one person challenging one book, but it’s really these vitriolic attacks on librarians and libraries in general, so kind of like Melissa was saying.

And then also the challenges of mis and disinformation, which obviously reference librarians in particular work with pretty directly. One of the things that students or even professionals will sometimes talk to me about is “How do you talk to somebody about mis and disinformation if they feel like you are really challenging their beliefs and their worldviews, regardless of where that information is coming from?”

So I think those are two areas of challenge as well. On a more practical level, we lay out from Samuel Sweatt Green back in like 1876, like this sort of three main areas of reference. So there’s the question answering service, which we usually think of when we use the word reference, but then there’s also instruction and outreach or community engagement. While I hear a lot of people dismissing the question answering service aspect quite a bit, you know, and the statistics, I think, support this to some extent that there are fewer questions being asked at libraries because people have such easy access to information. While I think that that’s true, I also think that service is not irrelevant at this point. I think that it’s just the focus of it may have changed a little bit in terms of helping people with more complex kinds of questions, with things that aren’t necessarily quick, easy answers.

But with that said, I would also perhaps say that if we are not spending as much time on the question answering services, it means that there is more time for the instruction and the community engagement, which I think arguably are at least as important, if not more important than the question answering services at this point, the community engagement in particular, because we know that there are always non users of our services. And so what is it that makes them a non-user? And is it awareness? Or is it the fact that we’re not creating the resources and the services that they really want and need? So making sure that we’re engaging in that part of the work and then the instruction, which again can be really useful in terms of some of the areas we’ve been talking about, like mis- and disinformation too.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. There’s a lot of getting out of the building and still providing some of the same services, but not necessarily waiting for people to come to you and come to the desk but going out to them. And yeah, like you said, we’re not doing so much of “What’s the capital of Montana?” anymore. Like, that’s Google. We don’t need to answer those kinds of questions anymore, but we still have to answer the other questions and some that are quote unquote easy ones of setting up email accounts. People don’t know about that stuff. So they still need technology help with things at public libraries, especially. There are people who don’t understand how to format a resume and things like that. So, depending on the kind of library you’re at, and reader’s advisory obviously is still a thing that falls under reference and it just is part of the job too. And that’s what a lot of people think of us as is ” books”. We’re much more than that, but we are books as well.

Melissa Wong: In some ways, I think it’s exciting because while the number of those ready reference questions has really dropped because people can Google the capital of Montana, I think it then opens up that possibility. It leaves us more time to do that other work, whether it’s really in depth reference question, where people really benefit from the expertise that we’re bringing, or as Laura says, the instruction, or the community outreach, or Steve, as you’re saying, the technology support that really makes a difference in people’s lives.

We can just reconceive of what’s happening at the reference desk, and I would much rather help somebody learn to use email or format their resume or consult with a faculty member on finding some really elusive data than just, you know, grabbing a dictionary and pointing to a definition of a word.

Steve Thomas: It’s the same thing. I mean, at my library, we have a lot of self-service stuff that can do self-checkout, you can do the printer kind of on your own and everything. And people were like, “Oh, you’re going to take away jobs!” No, it frees us up to do other things. I don’t need to be the one scanning a barcode to check you out, and I can still have those conversations with you when you’re at the self-checkout, but if you just want to come in and get your hold and leave, then you can, but that lets me go out into the community, go to the schools, go to everywhere, and bring the library to them. And just again, engage in those more in depth kind of things that we couldn’t do before, because we were busy helping you print twenty pages of your travel plans or something, but now you can just do it on your own.

Melissa Wong: I tell my students that the essence of reference has always been connecting our patrons with the information that they need. And it used to be that we did sit at the reference desk and wait for them to come ask for help, and they often needed our help to find information in our print collection, you had to have that deep knowledge of the print collection, but what you’re talking about, going out to schools, going out to community events, that is still the essence of reference, which is putting our patrons in contact with the information that they need.

Steve Thomas: And in academic and school libraries, going into a classroom and doing things instead of again, waiting for them to come to your conference room and things. You have time to do this other stuff. There’s plenty of work for librarians to do. I always say, the internet doesn’t make librarians less needed; it’s almost more because it’s just the haystack has gotten so much bigger now that you have to search through to find the right answer. And sometimes there’s fake hay in there. I don’t know, I’m kind of losing the metaphor there, but there’s false information in there too that we need to help.

So that’s part of the work too, misinformation, disinformation, figuring all this stuff out and guiding people through that. And Melissa, you mentioned that you use it in your classroom. So I had a question of what, how do you envision the book being used in classrooms? Some of it, you have some questions and activities for readers to do, but how do you use it in the classroom?

Melissa Wong: That was directed at me, but Laura, do you want to start?

Laura Saunders: Sure, I certainly could. I think that as a textbook, the obvious thing is that people are going to assign chapters for, for reading, and certainly that is what I do. In fact, what we’re doing at Simmons, we actually just revamped what was sort of historically our reference course to make it into a more broadly public service oriented course. This is a required course for all students, so it’s really an introduction to information behaviors, and then the sort of public services that are informed by and how they’re informed by information behaviors. And now we’re developing a new elective reference course. The reason I bring this up is because this textbook will actually span the two courses. So I’ll assign certain chapters in this first required course, but then students who choose to take the elective will keep the textbook and continue through with it.

 But I also think, and this is certainly one of the reasons why the textbook was designed this way, is that we’ve kind of sprinkled in these activities and discussion questions and things like that, that hopefully a student or any reader on their own might take the time to engage with, but I think that it’s especially useful for faculty members. So I’m thinking in particular, Melissa wrote the chapter on search strategies. And I’ve always spent a lot of time, right, every semester trying to come up with ideas for search activities and things like that. And this past semester, I just used the activities that Melissa created, and it was fantastic! Because first of all, the way she did it is they’re very well scaffolded throughout the chapter. It’s kind of like an introduction to searching for subject headings and then using the thesaurus and things like that. And using it in the classroom, I could see that the students were definitely engaged with the questions and they were getting what they wanted out of it. So I think as a newer professor, I think I always, I don’t know, I felt like it was cheating to use the activities that were included in the textbook. But now I recognize, like, that’s what they’re there for, and it’s really helpful, right? Because then I can use that time to come up with other additional ideas.

Melissa Wong: I think for me, a good textbook gives students or somebody who’s new to the topic a kind of broad overview or grounding in that topic, a little bit of history, a little bit of theory that’s shaped how we think about a particular topic or service and a hint of some of the key issues or challenges in that area.

So when I use the book in class, I often assign the chapters as that introduction, as that background. Number one, it means that I don’t need to lecture with some of that basic information because they’re getting it from the reading before they come to class and then we can build on that. But I also supplement each week with additional readings from current writing in the field, or sometimes a podcast or a webinar. If the book chapter is the background and the history, the supplemental readings are what’s really happening right now.

And in fact, when we edit the textbook, we give our authors a word count for each chapter, and we do try to limit the length with the idea, we assume that our colleagues are assigning a chapter, and then a handful of additional readings. And I feel like, Laura, a couple of editions ago, those chapters had kind of started to expand as people added more and more information, and it was all great information, but we realized that the chapters were getting a little unwieldy, and so we’ve started to really ask people to pull back a little bit and been a little bit stricter with the length of each chapter.

Steve Thomas: And what would you say is, I don’t know if percentage is right, but like, how often do you have a chapter completely rewritten as opposed to just adapting it and updating it for the next edition? Are a lot of the chapters just rewritten, or are they mostly just reedited?

Laura Saunders: I would say it depends on a couple of things. The first thing is whether the same author is continuing with the same chapter, right? So if the same author is doing the same chapter, I think oftentimes they will mostly do revisions, unless like, there has just been some complete change in the topic or something like that. And that’s not to say that the revisions might not be fairly extensive, but, you know, it’s their own work. They’re very familiar with it. I think what is perhaps different is when we get a new chapter author, and what I mean by that is a new person who is going to take over an existing chapter. I think in that case, it depends a little bit, but I think many of them start from scratch to kind of make it their own. And then, of course, obviously, if there’s a completely new chapter, like the one that we wrote on realities, obviously, that has to start from scratch.

Melissa Wong: There are also chapters where I see authors doing a lot of revision, particularly in those sources chapters where the sources have really changed in four years. We mentioned business earlier as an area where the databases are just continuously changing names, changing publishers. But if you look at that chapter over time, the fundamental structure is still very much the same. It’s like the skeleton never changes, but all of the content within the skeleton has to be updated.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, and these days, I mean, we’re in a very consolidation kind of world of things just constantly getting bought out.

Melissa Wong: Right. And even databases that in theory, haven’t changed, do change, I was doing my own research this week. And so I wanted to go to a library and information science source. When I went into the library, it said, here’s the link to the database. And then it said, “Option to use the new EBSCO interface” and I thought, “Okay, I’m really in a hurry at the moment. I don’t think I want to figure out a new interface. I’ll just use the old for today.” And I click to log in and EBSCO had already forced us all, I think, into the new version because I was like, “This is not the interface I am familiar with!” And as much as I do online searching, I write about online searching. I teach it. It took me a minute to figure out what was happening with that database and where to find the filters that I wanted to use.

But again, as I tell my students, this is how it works. You work at the reference desk one afternoon, you come in the next morning, and you go into what you think is a familiar resource, and it’s completely different and you have to just figure that out.

Steve Thomas: And is it a challenge not only all that, so like say you got all the URLs right and everything, is it a challenge to teach these kinds of sources if, like, the source that you are promoting is not subscribed to at the library that is this school, like, they can’t actually use that database because they don’t have a login for it. Do you have to make sure that it’s just described well enough in the book that they know what it does? That if they happen to be at an institution that does give them access, they can use this, but you can’t actually use it because, “Oh, you’re at University of Whatever that doesn’t subscribe to Business Whatever.”

Melissa Wong: It is definitely a challenge. Students will read about a database in the book and then we won’t have access to it. And I will say “This is an important database. I’m sorry we don’t have it, but you might when you go into the workplace.” Although again, it can open up good conversations about what are some workarounds then. Do we have a database that’s very similar? Or is there a way to use some free internet resources that might give you the same information, even if it’s not in the same format or it’s a little bit harder to uncover. Again, as a librarian, you know, very few librarians work at institutions where they have access to every database they could ever want to have access to, and so learning some of those workarounds is an important professional skill.

Steve Thomas: And I would say in this case, you’re teaching all kinds of librarians. They’re working in an academic library. No, they can’t access something that’s intended for school librarians. There are some that, there’s not a bad reason for it. It’s just that that’s not within the mission of that institution. But again, I think that’s great that you can turn that into workarounds and even like you said of when you’re doing the textbook and you’re getting further and further from the last edition, you’re giving supplemental readings and it’s a good example to them of how quickly the field changes to prep them for that.

Laura Saunders: Yeah, and I don’t know, Melissa, if this is the right venue to bring this up, but as you said, I mean, there’s good reasons why an academic library, which is where we’re going to be teaching these classes, would have access to children’s collections or things like that, databases on children’s collections. However, we have been able to work with some vendors to get either reduced or even complimentary access to certain databases just for the library schools so that our students can become familiar with them, and Melissa actually had a great idea for a conference presentation to try to raise awareness about why this kind of access is important. So I don’t know, Melissa, like I said, if you wanted to just kind of touch on that, because I thought this was a really great idea that we could all benefit from.

Melissa Wong: Yeah, I think it’s an important conversation to have, which is, how can LIS faculty who are teaching reference, teaching these sources to students who are future librarians, how can faculty work with vendors to provide complementary access to databases for students? There are some vendors who are really great to work with. SpringShare, for instance, will give library schools a library school sandbox where all of their students can have a complementary account so they can learn to use SpringShare’s products, but then there are other cases where vendors don’t offer those kinds of accounts. And I think it would be really great if we could find ways to work together, so students can learn about these, these databases for their careers or that they might be using.

I think it’s also really great for vendors because they should want our students to know what databases they offer and the value of those databases because again, in a year, our students are out of library school, they’re in libraries, and they’re making collection development decisions. As Laura says, I did put in a conference proposal to have a conversation about this. It did not get accepted, but you know, conference rejections happen to all of us. You can put that right on the podcast. I tell my students: everybody gets rejected from conferences. But that’s okay. I am looking for other venues to try to get this conversation going.

Laura Saunders: I hope you find one. I’m sorry it got rejected. Cause I do think that’s a really good conversation for us to be having.

Melissa Wong: You know, it’s okay. Just more work to be done, right?

Steve Thomas: I mean, I would think almost it’d be even easier for them to agree with the one that are out of scope, because I mean, I can see from their point of view, you don’t want an academic library to give access to another academic thing, because they’re trying to sell that journal itself, but again, an academic library doesn’t need, Novelist or something like that. They’re not going to use that as much, you know, it’s a reader’s advisory database. So their audience isn’t there necessarily for that, for an academic library. So you would think that the school library ones for the academic library, give free access, whatever, like that school was never going to buy that database anyway.

Melissa Wong: I think there is a large part of it where the vendors don’t quite understand what LIS faculty do. I find this when I go to conferences and I want to talk to vendors about what’s new in their database world, and I explain that I’m a faculty member in an LIS program and I teach courses and I teach students about their databases. And it’s funny because you can see that they keep shifting back to me as a library representative who might subscribe to their database.

And this is part of this conversation I’d like to get going is what is the role of faculty in teaching our future librarians about the different resources that are available because I do think that the ones that students use in class, the ones that their faculty are recommending to them, are the ones they then go use in their career, in the workplace. But it’s a pretty small niche of who vendors are marketing to. So anyway, trying to figure out how to get those conversations going.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. And at a conference, they’re just looking at you. They look at your name badge. It just says University of Illinois or whatever. And they’re like, “Oh, yep. Got to sell to them!”

Well, good luck with that, and hope that maybe somebody listening, if you want to have a conference going on and you want to publish it as an article or something, get in touch with Melissa.

So to wrap up, what’s the biggest thing that you think comes out of this 7th edition that is a change that you want to highlight?

Laura Saunders: I would just say I’m kind of circling back to the point that Melissa made earlier about what the role of the reference librarian is you know, keeping in mind this broad definition of reference as answering questions, but also providing instruction and community engagement. It’s all about connecting people to resources and people to information. And I make that point over and over again in the semester because I feel like a lot of the other areas of the curriculum tend to deal with one thing or another, right, like the tech courses often deal with the systems and the org courses deal with just the resources and things like that, and so what I love about reference and what I loved about being a reference librarian is it really does pull it all together.

I often have a mix of students who may be interested in libraries, but are also interested in a lot of other possible career paths, and what I often say to them is, first of all, I think the skills of dealing with people that you will hopefully develop in a reference class are relevant to everybody, but then also, there’s so much emphasis on collections and collection building and collection preservation and things like that. But again, what I’ll often say to students in the reference class is, “What are these collections for if nobody’s using them, right? If no one accesses them, nobody uses them.” So I feel like that role of reference is just so key. I know I’m a little biased, but that’s how I feel.

Melissa Wong: I would agree. I tell my students that everybody should take a metadata or a cataloging class, because even if you don’t plan to do cataloging, If you’re going into public service work, understanding how information is organized and the role of metadata in allowing us access to information, it makes you a better searcher and a better reference librarian.

And then the reverse is true that even if you’re going into something like technical services, reference, again, is all about connecting our patrons with information. We learn how people search for information. We learn about the reference interview. We learn about how to present information in ways that make sense to our patron and that should be at the heart of what’s happening everywhere else in our libraries and our archives and our information centers, that we’re always thinking about our patron. And to me, that’s what a really good reference course is also about, so therefore it’s valuable. No matter where you end up working.

Steve Thomas: Well, thank you, Melissa and Laura, so much for coming on the podcast. Again, the book is Reference and Information Services: an Introduction, and if you are a library school student, you may be reading this book soon. Thank you for coming on and I hope people get the book for their courses, and it’s very successful for you and we look forward to the eighth edition in four or five years.

But I think that there’s lots of good stuff in there. Like, as a long term practicing librarian, there was stuff in there that was helpful to remind me, so if you can get access to this, I realize this is not something that’s going to go in people’s personal libraries necessarily, but if you get access to it, if your library has it and you can get it, there are things in there to read and refresh your memory, at least. So thanks again for writing the book and for coming on the podcast.

Melissa Wong: Steve, thank you so much for having us.

Laura Saunders: Yeah, this was great.

Melissa Wong: It was such a pleasure. Take care, Steve. Thanks again.