Reference at Newman Library

Barbara Fister has a nice post up this week on her blog at InsideHigherEd that lists the tacit knowledge we librarians have that we can’t assume our students usually have. Fister’s blog isn’t aimed at librarians but at a wider spectrum of readers involved with higher education, so her list probably won’t be news to any of us here. Still, it’s worth checking out (as is most everything she writes).

The one thing I might quibble with is this item on her list:

Journals and magazines are published as ongoing series. For those of us who remember print, articles are bundled into issues, issues into volumes, and every year more articles are published in these bundles. If every article you ever read was found online, the relationship of articles to a particular journal published in a particular year is not at all obvious.

While the disintermediation of articles from their traditional containers (periodicals) has undercut the recognition that most articles were printed in a serial of some sort (a newspaper, journal, or magazine), those traditional serials now offer a constellation of articles available on their web sites that are not part of any one issue. Consider all the blogs that are now part of the New York Times (or the New Yorker or the Atlantic Monthly). Those articles are often written by the same staff writers at those publications yet are not tied to the issues, nor are they often indexed in our databases. Or consider the form of open access journal that publishes articles on a rolling schedule instead of bundling a set number into an issue; PLOS One and PeerJ are two examples of this.

I suspect that there are more articles published in serials than in these other new venues, but the latter format is a growing phenomenon on the web that I think we need to acknowledge and figure out how we present to students in reference interactions and classroom settings.