INLS 501: Street Reference
From Pomerantz
The advent of social Q&A has shown that providing information service is not the exclusive purview of librarians. The Slam the Boards initiative was an effort to have librarians at least partially reclaim that space. But people have and seek to fulfill their information needs everywhere, not just at reference desks or the online equivalents. Librarians therefore need to bring information services to the people.
Some particularly outreach-minded librarians have been providing reference work in public places for a long time. This assignment was inspired by the 2009 street reference fundraiser organized by students in the iSchool at the University of Toronto.
You must provide street reference, and write a brief report on the experience. You can conduct your street reference event anywhere you want. You can conduct your event individually or with a group. It might even make sense to coordinate a larger, class-wide effort with ILSSA or SCALA.
Your report will be due near the end of the semester. The report should be written by the same individuals who conducted street reference events together: if you provided street reference by yourself, write the report by yourself; if you provided street reference as part of a group, that group should write the report collectively. The report must address the following issues:
- Describe your street reference event: Where did you set up? What time of day? Did you need to get permission to set up there, then? How many answerers were involved? How many patrons served? What advertisement of the event did you do? Etc.
- What questions were asked, what were the answers, what was your information search and evaluation process to find those answers, and why did you select the sources you did.
- How did you handle the issue of answering questions using only resources on the free web, or if you used subscription resources, how did you handle that, given that your patron might not have the same access that you do.
Your (group's) report must be posted to the course site. Please tag your post with the tag street reference.

