For our reference warmup, we were asked to find the poverty rates of
India, China, Mexico, and the United States. We discovered that it wasn’t very
easy to find nor compare because poverty is measured in different ways
depending upon the country. Furthermore, what’s considered a family can vary
too. In the United States, it’s immediate family whereas in some of the other
countries, it also includes the grandparents. Discovering things like this just
makes me hate reference even more.
The professor mentioned how Harper Collins had a fight with librarians
saying that each ebook could only be checked out 26 times because that’s the
print life of a book. Librarians proved that to be untrue. I find this funny
how a company is trying to get as much profit as it can. If print books didn’t
last long, we wouldn’t have books from the 1400s or even older still intact.
What’s the difference between having an ebook that patrons can check out or a
print copy? The company gets paid for the one copy, no matter the format.
We talked for a while about “reference is dead.” One thing that was
mentioned is that a lot of reference books in public libraries aren’t being
used so they are moving them into circulation. That is what we are going to do
at my library. We did it a long time ago, where we moved older years of volume
sets, and older editions to circulation. That was fun because I had to unlink
all of the records so that their status could be changed to main collection while
the one copy stayed in reference. But soon we are going to do it again. For years,
my boss has been nagging the other reference librarians to go through the
collection and pull books, but only a couple have actually done it, but they
didn’t really pull a lot though. I think this will be great because there are a
lot of books people want to check out, but can’t because they’re part of the
reference collection. They can be checked out for 24 hours, but only some librarians
will allow this; others won’t.
Reference isn’t and never will be dead; it’s just changing. A lot of librarians
are helping patrons with genealogy and ITS help. Libraries are also creating
makerspaces. Furthermore, part of reference is customer service. I don’t have a
lot of experience with reference, but I have had a lot of customer service training.
The other day a patron wanted information on Disney’s company rivals in South
Africa. I could not find a single thing, but once I got information from a librarian,
I emailed the patron, who thanked me for following up. Also, there are
different roles in a library, just because reference librarians never sit at
the desk, doesn’t make them less than a reference librarian. The director of
our library doesn’t sit at the desk, and our archivist only sits at the desk 2
hours a week. They are still reference librarians, they just have different job
duties that are far more important than sitting at the reference desk which can
easily be covered by the other librarians. And at least they are doing
something, because there are some reference librarians who don’t do their job
at all. They don’t want to help patrons, and the patrons know it. I can’t tell
you how many times we get phone calls from patrons complaining that the
reference librarian wasn’t very willing to help them or they will call and ask
if the librarian they talked to is now gone from the desk and someone different
is there. This is very poor customer service.
A couple things that the professor mentioned that astonished me was that
librarians have unions (I don’t know why this never occurred to me before) and
that Oakland County was one of the wealthiest counties in America before Orange
County was. The latter is sad. Michigan used to be so great.
It is interesting to get a perspective that is so frank about the mixed bag of reference librarians. Although our class focuses on the standardizing of reference customer service, it is apparent that outside of the classroom is very different than inside the classroom.
ReplyDeleteI think you touch on a really important point here that has been central to this class: customer service is the key component that makes any interaction successful. All of the talk about reference being dead really neglects from the fact that people will always be needing to ask for help when they enter the library. To what extent they need an actual librarian behind a physical reference desk remains to be seen, but your example about patrons calling to see if the bad reference librarians is gone and someone else is at the desk illustrates that attempting to help is crucial for our work.
ReplyDeleteI am not entirely sure that I agree that reference is customer service. I think of reference as being much more multifaceted than that. I do agree that customer service is a component, but it is untrue that reference is limited in that way. If reference was completely customer service based, then our users would simply become customers. I think that is a dangerous view that misrepresents the true dynamic. In fact, I like to think patrons as part of the same community where librarians and patrons are equals. Not all reference librarians hold this view, some ignore the customer service component and others embrace it. What I am saying is that those two extremes are equally dangerous. One alienates the patron, while the other changes what reference means.
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