Barriers and Challenges to Teaching Reference in Today's Electronic Information Environment (Report‪)‬

Introduction For many years in many graduate programs of LIS, a large portion of reference and information services instruction involved teaching students to conduct reference interviews, to answer reference questions, and to use common reference tools, such as encyclopedias, almanacs, and bibliographies. Early on these reference tools were in paper formats. Today reference providers increasingly rely on electronic versions of these sources. In both public and academic library reference services, this reliance has reached the point of an overwhelming preference for electronic tools, sometimes surpassing ninety percent of reference tool use (Shachaf & Shaw, 2008). In addition, many of today's librarians answer reference questions via a variety of online technologies, from email to chat, instant messaging, SMS text messaging, and virtual worlds (Eisenberg, 2008), as well as handling other library utilities such as social networking pages, podcasting and video-sharing sites, RSS feeds, blogs, and wikis (Mon & Randeree, 2009).