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Digital Reference Research: Fusing Research and Practice

This article presents the Digital Reference Research agenda developed as a result of a three-day symposium at Harvard University. It shows how the research agenda ties directly to digital reference and library practice and argues that research and practice must connect on a meaningful level in order to prevent unusable research and untestable practice. Background Digital reference is one of the hottest issues in libraries today. Academic, public, and special libraries are rushing to offer human intermediation services over the Internet. Conference sessions on the topic are filled, workshops are well-attended, and major library organizations, including the Reference and User Services Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries, and OCLC, are developing digital reference training programs and products. However, unlike the research interest associated with digital libraries, there has been relatively little in the way of research interest in the study of digital reference. Aside from the work of a small group of researchers such as the author, Joe Janes, Charles McClure, Marilyn White, and Eileen Abels, digital reference has remained primarily in the province of the practitioner. Practitioner orientation can be seen when one examines the annual Virtual Reference Desk (VRD) Conference (www.vrd.org/conf-train.shtml), a central locus for digital reference. A series of initiatives, from the development of quality metrics to technical standards to education was developed each year as the result of the VRD conferences. The emphasis on research and scholarly participation in these conferences, however, has been small. (1) For the third conference, organizers received nearly eighty proposals for presentations, but only two of them were submitted by library and information science (LIS) faculty members. The separation between research and practice is resulting in very real consequences. Large amounts of money are being invested in digital reference services by universities, public libraries, governmental agencies, and foundations. These monies are being invested in services, software, and planning without benefit of clear empirical research pointing to best practices and without benefit of clear understanding of the advantages and shortcomings of these reference services. A further consequence relates to the lack of interaction between the digital reference and digital library communities. While digital reference can be seen as a subfield of digital libraries, few instances exist where research and development in these areas has been coordinated, although each of these communities is beginning to understand the importance of the other. The goal of a three-day research symposium held in August 2002 at Harvard University was to rectify the lack of interaction between the digital reference and digital library communities. The symposium leaders wanted to engage the information science and digital library research communities in an examination of digital reference by building on existing research and lessons learned from practice. The leaders also wanted to develop a digital reference research agenda. The research agenda resulting from the symposium is presented in this article. The research agenda presented here is a reference document that outlines: * the scope and scale of the digital reference phenomena; * current knowledge about the phenomena under investigation; * recognized gaps in the understanding of the phenomena; and * a common belief of the priorities necessary to fill the gaps in understanding. By creating and promoting a research agenda, a clearer picture of the field of digital reference can be developed. This clearer picture of the field, with its research priorities and shared knowledge, can provide benefit to funding agencies as they attempt to support development in the reference practitioner community. …