Serviço de referência: práticas informacionais do bibliotecário

Abstract

This research is motivated by questioning the reference service, and its general objective was to understand how the Reference Process actually happens within the professional practice. We also wanted to identify which factors influence the librarians practice in the Reference Process, regarding the librarian as a social subject that interacts with other subjects. We sought to study the reference process under the phenomenological perspective given the need to understand work quotidian. Thus, a qualitative research was conducted using deep semi-structured interviews with eight librarians who work at public, private, school, university and specialized libraries, who work in the reference sector, and we also observed the everyday life of those working in the same environment. Results show that the referencing process, in practice, is influenced by several factors, such as: the environment of the library, professional experiences of librarians, users who have history, a baggage of knowledge and who build together a referential process. Practice, within the reference service, comes from experience, from living everyday life, which are considered as more important for the practice than the undergraduate course or the subjects related to Reference Services. The dominant process in libraries is a traditional one, counts with the presence of the user in the library, the Educational Process is poorly used and the Virtual Reference Process is still incipient and poorly used only one library has virtual service. In the reference service, in general, there is no planning, such as the creation of policies, assessment of services and user studies. Everyday life at the reference service is marked by the search, use, and sharing of information among librarians and other professionals, that being a way for them to keep up-to-date within this field. Results even reveal that the actions developed depend much more on the context where libraries are than within their typology by itself. Thus, the Reference Process is seen as a reality interpreted by the individuals, who subjectively imprint a meaning to their actions, given that a socially built reality which is under the influence of the baggage of knowledge and the biographic situation of the subjects involved in the process, and mainly, from context because it is in the latter is the place where the actions acquire meaning; it is often, not only the typology of library what influences the services/products and actions of reference, but also the context of every library what does.