Envisioning the future of reference instruction : LIS students' and practitioners' opinions on print and online sources.

Though we discuss the phenomenon of ‘information overload’ due to the Internet, the shift to the Internet for fact-finding and research is really another variation on a continued theme in reference service: too many sources. The bloated reference collection of the past resulted in a “needle in the haystack” phenomenon. Librarians couldn’t know the entire collection,2 and users couldn’t find what they wanted because of an overwhelming abundance of choices. Today’s spare print reference collection is a response to an abundance of online resources and a shift in where our users are: less inside our walls, more outside. More and more, libraries are depending on online sources (databases and the free Web) to fill out their reference collection. This variety of online resources is just as confusing to the patron (and the novice librarian) as those larger print collections were earlier.Post-printIncludes bibliographical references