August 5, 2025
The Reference SIG was held in person at Southeastern's office and was facilitated by Lara Sibley of Goshen Public Library.
Topic: Promoting​ database selection and use in reference interactions
What has worked well?
- Gale Legal Forms—convenient and trusted source for these and helps those unfamiliar with them
- LinkedIn Learning—need to do more to promote it, perhaps developing a promotion campaign to advertise it
- Feels like we almost need to do a pitch or campaign to our patrons to get them to use databases over internet
When to use databases?
- Depends upon depth of question and interest
- Also dealing with impatience and rushed interactions
- Hard to sell when internet is easier, seems to prioritizes ease, but at the same time, this doesn’t help people when they have more complex questions and ask us for help.
- Often times folks of a certain age are more comfortable with technology like databases, but younger doesn’t always mean comfortable with databases, depends upon their exposure
Dealing with AI in Research and Databases
- AI makes reference harder for us, seems to be more about providing an answer than sources, but a deeper look at their sources is important
- Databases that have incorporated AI fall into this as well and don’t necessarily do the best job.
- Expressed a wish that databases would use AI to help with search terms and subject headings (especially these and those that are truncated like LOC headings) rather than source recommendations
- AI also contributes to misinformation and a lack of knowledge.
- Also wished databases would focus more on the user experience rather than AI, example of EBSCOhost’s recent update to push account services over search filters
How do we get our patrons to use databases?
- Do more to advertise them and show how to access them through our websites
- Spend more time explaining to patrons why we are using this over an internet search, addressing quality and reliability
- How to advertise?
- Social media posts to advertise
- Handouts that show how to navigate from website to database as well as what can be found in the database
- Interview patrons who have used them, get them to help us advertise these resources