{"id":64,"date":"2012-06-08T16:08:00","date_gmt":"2012-06-08T04:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/?p=64"},"modified":"2012-06-08T16:08:00","modified_gmt":"2012-06-08T04:08:00","slug":"8-accurate-reference-service-blogjune","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/2012\/06\/8-accurate-reference-service-blogjune\/","title":{"rendered":"8: accurate reference service #blogjune"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>[I have no idea why this didn&#8217;t post yesterday as it was meant to.]<\/p>\n<p>The &#8220;55 percent rule&#8221; &#8211; that unobtrusive studies tend to show a 55% success rate of librarians answering reference queries fully and accurately &#8211; seems to have been written about most in the mid\/late-1980s so my quick-and-dirty Google Scholar search isn&#8217;t bringing up much handy full-text to link to.  (Some, but closed access and gigantic files that freeze my computer for a minute so needn&#8217;t be inflicted on anyone else. Who decided to scan black-and-white Library Journal articles in as colour???)  Anyway, my quick-and-dirty impression of the literature thus surveyed is that the number was so shocking that it prompted vast flurries of a) studies to try and replicate\/refute the results, and b) studies to say that users don&#8217;t care about full and accurate answers anyway.<\/p>\n<p>I have a different response, inspired by today&#8217;s date, which is:  If the reference service we&#8217;re providing is so incomplete and inaccurate, why not save our time\/salaries and just hand users a <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Magic_8-Ball\">Magic 8-Ball<\/a> instead?<\/p>\n<p>[NB: This post is not guaranteed to be more than 55% indicative of the actual definition of the rule nor the state of the literature, but it is at least 55% flippant.  What I actually think is that we should be developing clever chatbots to staff our virtual reference service.  Or at least 55% of it.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[I have no idea why this didn&#8217;t post yesterday as it was meant to.] The &#8220;55 percent rule&#8221; &#8211; that unobtrusive studies tend to show a 55% success rate of librarians answering reference queries fully and accurately &#8211; seems to have been written about most in the mid\/late-1980s so my quick-and-dirty Google Scholar search isn&#8217;t [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[66,68,67],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deborahfitchett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}