I always enjoy the RIEMA conference: it's small enough that you can actually catch up with people, but big enough to give you a nice selection of workshops. And there's free coffee all day. I attended Bonnie Lilienthal's reference workshop, and had some interesting conversation with her before and during. She said that many librarians tell her they're ordering fewer reference sets (which didn't surprise me) and fewer nonfiction titles in general (which did surprise me). They claim they're simply getting fewer reference questions, because kids use online resources to complete their homework.
I don't have that problem. I do have kids coming in with different kinds of information needs, so I am switching up the selection on my reference shelves. But I'm not eliminating that part of my collection. Frankly, I wish I knew one of the librarians who is buying less nonfiction so I could say: "That's so interesting! Tell me more!" when really I mean: "That's wack. Don't the kids in your school district still do reports on Native American Tribes, Countries, States, specific species of animals and ancient cultures? Don't the kids want world record, poetry, joke, and drawing books? Don't you have those ambitious early literacy teachers who want science books appropriate for 3-year-olds?" But every community's different, so I shouldn't judge.
So instead I'll focus on the new demands for reference. In some cases, I haven't found a good reference set to meet these demands, but here are the kinds of questions I'm getting:
