libraryjournal: bookavore: Readers’ advisory practice So cool. I want to play this at librarian parties. (Hypothetical reference challenges were my favorite part of the notoriously demanding Reference core course at Simmons, and maybe of library school in general. I DON’T KNOW THE ANSWER BUT I KNOW WHERE TO FIND IT.)
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libraryjournal:

bookavore:

Readers’ advisory practice

So cool.

I want to play this at librarian parties. (Hypothetical reference challenges were my favorite part of the notoriously demanding Reference core course at Simmons, and maybe of library school in general. I DON’T KNOW THE ANSWER BUT I KNOW WHERE TO FIND IT.)

Source: bookavore

Letters to a Young Librarian: My Reference Desk Conundrum

calimae:

More specifically, I’m thinking about how I answer reference questions. The analogy I’ve always used is about teaching someone how to catch fish versus giving them a fish right now. It’s rare that I just answer questions at the reference desk, especially when the asker is a student. Instead, I escort the student over to one of our public computers and walk them through the process of figuring it out for themselves. I make them work for it because I believe that working for it means they’ll eventually be able to answer questions for themselves.

[…]

My thinking on this is definitely evolving, so I’d love to get your input. For the librarians (degreed or otherwise) in my reading audience, how do you handle it? Further: does your library have an official stance on how to handle reference desk interactions? For the library science students, what have your professors had to say on the subject?

These are some interesting questions/thoughts. At our reference desk, the questions usually take the form of ‘how do I…’ or ‘where can I find…’, which lend themselves fairly readily to the teach-them-to-fish approach, though of course there are certain patrons who just want us to provide information (e.g. a call number) that they could get themselves but they don’t want to.

Our email questions are much more likely to demand an answer, but I think most of us do provide information about how we located the resources we provide in our response. Some of my favorite questions have been ones where the patron asks ‘how do I research this?’—those are fun to answer. :)

Many of my patrons are really busy, really afraid of technology, or have a really weak educational background. I try to gauge through questions whether they are interested in learning how I am finding the answer, or just need a quick information fix.

For instance, I had a (senior citizen) lady recently who wanted to see a few verses on the Bible in the NKJV. For whatever reason, we don’t have much in the way of Bibles, and so I asked, “How do you feel about the Internet?” and then, when she said she could do some things on the Web, I walked her through a free website that lets you compare translations. She was a good candidate for being empowered to answer her own questions.

Sometimes that’s not the case. The harried mom with four kids in tow, the caller who sounds a million years old and just wants to know when the library closes — I can give them a good experience with the library so that they can come back with more in-depth questions later, but I don’t try to teach them every time. (Even if I really wish the latter would learn to look at our website!)

Margaret the Reference Librarian

1.      Can you tell us about your current position?

I am a reference librarian in a mid-sized public library just outside of Richmond, VA. Right now I do a little bit of everything, I help with story-time, book-club, teach computer classes, teach patrons how to use their E-readers, manage the reference desk, and fix computer problems. Being a public librarian to me means being pretty good at everything and I have learned to be very flexible and to adapt to many situations. I love my job, I love working with the public, and I love being challenged every day as it makes me be an even better librarian!

 

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exciting library interactions

  1. woman with ten-year-old daughter who aspires to be a librarian someday
  2. police officer who needs instructions on how to access our online subscription for test prep and is very patient when the mouse doesn’t work
  3. reference call about the ethnic origins of his grandmother’s last name

Less so:

  1. when #3 lapses into friendly advice on how I should wait as long as possible to have children so I keep my figure and my husband.

library:

Declining reference

One area where public libraries really are changing rather dramatically is reference.  In the per capita results we see a general decline in reference transactions, and when we look at per visitation the trend is really obvious.  

So far what we’ve seen in our data about public library users is that we have more people coming to public libraries, and they’re taking out about the same number of materials and asking a lot fewer reference questions.

Data (and Chart) Source: IMLS Public Survey Fiscal Year 2009

From what I’ve seen at my library and in the region on school assignments, many of the reference questions come from patrons with (broadly construed) special needs: either academic fine-tuned questions, or language barriers; either older people or people with developmental/emotional issues. No one just wants to know the state bird of Minnesota anymore; most people know how to find that on their own.

I also don’t see a lot of our reference materials ever getting unshelved in our collection. I’m starting to think, yeah, keep a couple of encyclopedias in reference and subscribe to some good databases, but just circulate the rest. Is this too premature of me?

yesterday, at the library

I:

  • proofread a resume for a patron.
  • tried to help a patron get his resume off a floppy disk (!) and submitted online. It may have been the first time I was actually grateful for our circa-2002 computer lab.
  • helped find and request books on technology addiction for a high school kid.
  • searched the NPR archives with a third patron for a book about string theory, mentioned on NPR, the previous day (and found it! Thank you, excellently navigable NPR website.).

So, basically, it was the sort of day you talk about in your reference class but never actually have.

‘The first half of my career, I was deep into reference’ [said librarian Dennis Carlisle.] Then people stopped calling and stopping by so much. They migrated to Web browsers. Libraries replaced shelves of phone books, atlases and maps with banks of computers. Another group of people came to the library, people who didn’t own computers, or who couldn’t afford high-speed Internet access, people who often don’t know the first thing about using one of the machines.
Jerry Large, “Librarian finds digital divide has changed his job”