ResearchWorks Archive
    • Login
    View Item 
    •   ResearchWorks Home
    • Faculty and Researcher Data and Papers
    • University Libraries
    • Librarian and Staff Publications
    • View Item
    •   ResearchWorks Home
    • Faculty and Researcher Data and Papers
    • University Libraries
    • Librarian and Staff Publications
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    Does the Reference Desk Still Matter?: Assessing the Desk Paradigm at the University of Washington Libraries

    Thumbnail
    View/Open
    Raftus_and_Collins_Does-the-Reference-Desk-Still-Matter.pdf (897.2Kb)
    Date
    2015
    Author
    Raftus, Deb
    Collins, Kathleen
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    Abstract
    The University of Washington (UW) comprises three campuses and several off-campus facilities and is the largest comprehensive research institution in the Pacific Northwest. UW’s Seattle campus, its largest, has thirteen libraries which serve 43,000 students and 4,300 faculty and host over five million annual visits to library facilities and nine million separate visits to Libraries websites. With the increasing availability of research content online, a significant portion of UW’s faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates now privilege desktop delivery of content over physical visits to library buildings for their research. A growing shift toward remote access is similarly evident in reference services—one-fifth of questions in 2011 came in via email and chat. It is logical, then, to ask: Are librarians with advanced degrees making their most effective contribution to the scholarly community by staffing walk-up reference desks, where annual statistics show a steep decline in business? To address this question, the Reference Desk Services Task Force (hereafter “the task force”) was established in winter 2011 to assess services at the three Seattle campus libraries that still maintained stand-alone reference desks: the main research library, Suzzallo-Allen; the Odegaard Undergraduate Library; and the Engineering Library.
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/1773/35468
    Collections
    • Librarian and Staff Publications [76]

    DSpace software copyright © 2002-2015  DuraSpace
    Contact Us | Send Feedback
    Theme by 
    @mire NV
     

     

    Browse

    All of ResearchWorksCommunities & CollectionsBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsThis CollectionBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjects

    My Account

    LoginRegister

    DSpace software copyright © 2002-2015  DuraSpace
    Contact Us | Send Feedback
    Theme by 
    @mire NV