Print reference materials...the way of the dodo?

Originally, my plan was to blog about making print reference materials and nonfiction relevant and, therefore, selected by users.  We have students in our library constantly, and they almost never use actual print sources for information.  If we pull a cart of print resources, an occasional student will pick and choose from the sources, but generally, our print reference materials are hardly touched. 

Step one of our rectifying this situation has been to interfile our reference, as much as possible, in our nonfiction collection and to keep only selected sets of reference that function best as a complete set in a section of reference.  It turns out that interfiling reference and allowing it to circulate are hot topics in the library world.  Check out this blog (and the comments/replies!) for more: http://ricklibrarian.blogspot.com/2010/03/reference-books-to-go-liberation-of-our.html.

My co-librarian and I are both new to our library, so we were not the ones who initially made the reference material selections, nor are we familiar with the reasons the items were selected.  I can’t even imagine the last time the reference section was weeded because there were “The New” and “Modern” versions of resources from the 1990s. I say were because we heavily weeded the reference materials over the last few weeks, which was a little complicated, due to our lack of background knowledge on previous selection and use.  Needless to say, we have truly almost never seen a reference book picked up off the shelves, so we knew we needed to get rid of everything that was irrelevant and inaccurate to start.  Check out this blog for weeding tips – I found it helpful with an unfamiliar collection:  http://cdstacked.blogspot.com/2013/01/tips-for-weeding-your-reference.html.

For more on the decreasing need for print resources, a concept with which I truly am grappling, check out this article by Paul Hellyer – a little old (2009), but referenced in several other articles and blogs on the topic: http://www.aallnet.org/mm/Publications/spectrum/archives/Vol-13/pub_sp0903/pub-sp0903-ref.pdf.

And for more thoughts on spending less money from our library budgets on print resources:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/information-culture/why-i-done28099t-buy-print-reference-books/.

So, my initial search took me to different territories of the reference world than I was originally exploring, but it provided me with new ideas and additional ways  to think about the process we are undergoing – isn’t that the best kind of research after all, the kind that takes us where we didn’t know we wanted to go?