ENEMIES OF TRUTH
A conviction is more dangerous
to the truth than a lie.
Nietzsche- Human, All Too Human



The future of reference from the librarian’s perspective must deal with two issues to proceed. First: the nature of fact. Is reference services simply a place for referring to and dispensing facts such as we discussed with retail reference or is our duty higher, that not only are were to dispense fact but truth as well? Facts and truths are not synonymous, the meaning and connotations are very distinct and separate. Have you ever watched a sunset and said “Why that is so very beautiful”. PROVE IT.
You cannot. It is not just that beauty is in the eye of the beholder as that is just an equivocation, as using that very saying would be factual statement but made without any type of proof or reference and therefore cannot be truthful ( unless of course one were an American Pragmatist). Yet few of us would disagree that the sunset is beautiful. Truth can exist without facts, but facts cannot exist without truth. A fact is empirical and given to some form of observation from direct experience or from mechanical apparatus that give us the advantage of viewing the event. However a truth is derived from episteme. I can make an induction and know it is true, example: I know that there is no number so large that I cannot add one and make that number greater by one. Perhaps the math exists to prove this, however I do not need the fact to prove it. It is an induction. My point is to highlight that when considering how we are to proceed as librarians in reference and what it is that we are referring to we need to distinguish between fact and truth, and our patrons need both expressed and otherwise. We must remember that our first duty is to the enlightenment of the patron and oftimes the patron does not even have the rudimentary knowledge needed to ask the question!
Secondly we must determine what an authoritive source, especially in delivering fact is. As we have discovered over the course of 17 weeks we have seen how easy it is to produce professional looking information sources on the web that are taken to be matters of truth, if not fact. We have agreed that people with a degree in library science that they are qualified in delivering and discerning information sources. These people know how to catalog, retrieve, store and search informational sources. We may know more and indeed could probably qualify for degrees in other specialties, but have largely subscribed to the notion that professionals are those people with adequate training from other authoritive sources. It is not only our field we do this in, but medical, physics and probably should with cars, but somehow we tend to think that mechanics is something readily learned and can be given to the next person who comes along. The point I am striving to make is that we, by the virtue that we are attempting to obtain our degrees in LIS have bought into this idea to some degree.
So our two propositions are these: There are professionals who are capable of discerning fact and truth from information of lesser quality. We also agree that because of the interconnectivity and freeflow of communication of information types along the information superhighway not all is valid or worth using, perhaps not even this final statement of the future of reference, BUT that the information professional will be capable of discerning the majority of the time of what is fact, truth, rumor or otherwise—helping the patron and our colleagues navigate the exponential release of daily data.
WE ARE THE GUARDIANS of the common good and dedicated to the individual who is a component of that social structure. We are trust worthy to our patrons because when they refer to us, it
is akin to our referring to our favorite reference source. By being diligent to the truth we will create a fact that libraries remain the most revered shrines and depositories of knowledge, whether it be popular culture or “high” culture. Librarians are the gateways to understanding the world and we must always remember that our face is the face of the patron’s ideal of the library!
Be well friends.