The relevance of reference Librarian in the 21st century: a critical look

Abstract

This paper examines the relevance of the reference librarian in the face of ubiquitous IT tools which could be used to access information resources from a remote place without necessarily coming physically to the library. The users seems to under-estimate the impact of the library and librarians in their quest for information, since there is the Internet, search engines, databases and myriads of other online journals, institutional repositories, self-archives, academic blogs from which information could be crawled within seconds. This phenomenon has brought about a gross reduction in the use of library resources by patrons, and reference librarians seem to be redundant in their duty posts. It was revealed in this study that reference librarians are now faced with new roles, and dynamic methods of service delivery. New roles of the reference librarian in the 21st century includes providing access to information, acting as information advocates, advising role, information organisation and retrieval, knowledge and digital management, and information mining, digital referencing among others. The study concluded that the reference librarian (‘Hybrid Librarian’) must adapt to the growing trends of Information and Communication Technology, using internet resources, new social media, semantic web, cloud computing, mobilie technology (Library 2.0/3.0) and other relevant tools in carrying out reference services.

Key words: Reference Librarian, Hybrid Librarian, Online referencing, Information and Communication Technology (ICT), Library 3.0 and Apo mediation