Ryan Deschamps’ latest post, Does a Fish Know It’s Wet? : Access to Scholarly Journals in Public Libraries, reminded me (in a roundabout way) of another fairly obvious point about Open Access that I’d been meaning to write up and inflict upon you.

The stereotype around librarians and Open Access is that librarians are on board mostly because we think that we’ll end up getting to ax expensive journals and thus solve our “serials crisis.” (Can a “crisis” last twenty years?)

I’m sure a lot of librarians do think that, especially directors and heads of collection development and others who have to write checks to Elsevier and similar corporations. But for the reference librarian, I think the thought process is a little different.

Instead of thinking of the up-front cost of the journal, we reference librarians are thinking more about helping people one-on-one. Reference librarians are pathologically helpful. I have seen reference librarians keep patrons pinned to the desk while they hunt down just one more source. I have seen reference librarians continue working on a question long after the questioner has left, never to return. Yes, we like to help people for their sake, but it also scratches an ever-present itch for the librarian to be useful, helpful, and knowledgeable.

So it is a big drag if instead of being able to give someone the perfect source, we instead end up with just a citation and not the full text in hand or online. It is no fun at all if instead of a full text PDF we find a web page demanding a credit card number to buy the three-page article for thirty bucks. Where is the satisfaction in telling someone to go to ILL? That is an itch unscratched. Like the rest of the online world, we say along with Jason Scott’s imaginary reader, “Let us see this work, immediately, for free, with a single mouse click.”

I’m not saying this is a rational point of view, that OA should prosper so that reference librarians can feel good and get high-fives at the reference desk. And I suppose that “we’ll never again have to tell someone the article is behind a pay wall” is just the flip side of “we’ll never again have to pay for expensive subscriptions.” But I do think that for many of us, what catches our attention is the ideal experience for the researcher rather than the ideal experience for the serials budget.