The award, $2,500 and a plaque donated by Reference Service Press Inc., is given to the author(s) of the most outstanding article published in Reference and User Services Quarterly (RUSQ), the official journal of the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA), during the preceding two volume years. Formerly, RUSQ was known as RQ.
The winning article for 2002, "Has the Internet Changed Anything in Reference? The Library Visit Study, Phase 2," is based on an ongoing study in which the authors specifically investigated the extent to which electronic resources, including the Internet, are being used and whether or not those resources have affected the experience of the user. A "troubling" finding, according to the authors, is that "reference staff seem to regard the Internet as an external resource that users can search independently--at home or on the library's public access workstations--but not as a full-fledged reference tool for which reference librarians have a responsibility to help users search and evalaute." Want to read this award-winning article in its entirety online? Click here.
This article was chosen for the 2002 Reference Service Press Award, said Julie Tharp, chair of the Reference Service Press Award Committee, because it "is a thought-provoking study which comes from a decade long project focusing on the user's own experiences of the reference transaction." As a result, Tharp concludes, this study "serves as an excellent reminder that the basics of good reference service (the reference interview, effective referrals, asking follow-up questions, etc.) are still just as important as which resources we use to answer reference questions."
Ross is a professor and acting dean of Media and Information Studies at the University of Western Ontario. Nilsen is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Media and Information Studies at the University. Both teach in the University's Graduate Program of Library and Information Science. This is the second time that Ross has been selected to receive the Reference Service Press Award; in 1996, she received this honor for her co-authored article, "Flying a Light Aircraft: Reference Service Evaluation from a User's Viewpoint."
