6A: Reflection on Class 10-4-16

The warm-up for the class was to write down what questions we would ask a patron in response to asking for our help with a paper on motes. I originally was thinking dust motes, but it didn’t say “dust”. So I wasn’t sure. One classmate brought up a good point that if this was a verbal transaction, then one could think that the patron was talking about castle moats. A few classmates brought up that one question that could be asked is some version of “How much have you already researched on the topic?” I forget about this question EVERY SINGLE TIME. I don’t know why, but I just do. I think I need to start thinking of this question as the very first question I need to ask. The motes that the question was about is the Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium which is located in Florida. Tricky question.

At one point, the word “satisfice” came up in discussion. It means that when you are doing any kind of activity, you get to the point where you believe that it is good enough. I can definitely relate to this. I hate cooking and often I get tired and just stop, saying that’s good enough. I did it with the first and only time I made a stuffed pepper soup. I got so tired of chopping peppers that there was no way I was going to also chop an onion up, so instead I used onion flakes. And then I didn’t have fresh garlic so I used minced garlic. I kept stirring and tasting and it didn’t taste great. It didn’t taste bad, but I just got to the point where I no longer cared. I believed it didn’t taste great because I didn’t use fresh onions and garlic. Plus, I suck at cooking. I let it cook without stirring. But it ended up tasting awesome! I just had to let it simmer for awhile. That was the trick.

Last week, I had a transaction with a patron where “satisfice” comes into play in relation to searching for a book. He wanted a book for his class and wanted to know if we had it. We didn’t and I told him we could do an inter-library loan request for it. He didn’t want to because he procrastinated and it was due very soon. He then thanked me and hung up. Well, I don’t like giving up, and I wanted to see if any of the local libraries had it. But instead of going to Worldcat, I just googled it. Well, I found it. And it wasn’t a book. It was an article, to which you can have free access to. So I called him back and left a message that I found it, telling him that it was the third hit on the yahoo search engine (Yes, I know. I said “googled” but I wasn’t using the Google search engine). Shortly after I was off the reference desk, he called circulation and said he wanted to thank the person for finding it for him. If he had just stayed on the phone for a couple more minutes, instead of thinking the searching I did was good enough, I wouldn’t have had to call him back.

One classmate mentioned how he wished course reserves had an online reservation system. I think that’s a great idea, but I can see it having the same exact problems as we have involving reserved study rooms at my library. A person could check the book out having reserved it, but they may not return it when they are supposed to. Or someone may reserve the book, but don’t show up at all to check it out, so someone else could have had it the whole time (this happens with the study rooms all the time. We had to put in place a policy that stated that if you are not here within the first 30 minutes, then you forfeit the room. We recently went down to 15 minutes, which reminds me to make sure I updated the document to say 15 minutes).

                Towards the end of class, we talked about our missing course reserve. After class, I decided to go look for it. I cannot stand it when a book is missing. It’s one of my biggest pet peeves in relation to my work. Plus, I was the last person to check it out, so what the heck?! I first checked Shapiro’s main collection for it then headed to Askwith where the course reserves are. When I entered a girl was drawing the main Harry Potter characters playing Quidditch on a whiteboard (she’s a really good drawer). The whiteboard is moveable and what they use as their door to go back behind the counter. So I was able to see books closer than if I were to stand at the counter, plus any other time the stack of books would be hidden behind the white board. Right away I spotted the professor’s book which she gave to the library to put on reserve since the library’s copy was missing. I had looked up the call numbers before leaving class, so I definitely knew that it was her book. I then scanned the rest of the books on the stack and saw the missing one. I then went up to the counter and asked for a book on course reserve. I gave the guy the course number and he actually looked it up correctly (2 out of 4 now). I told him I wanted the missing book. He said it was missing. I told him I know, but I would like to know where it is supposed to be shelved and he said I couldn’t go back there, to which I told him that’s ok, just walk to where it’s supposed to be. He walked around the corner to the left of where I found it. So then I pointed to him where it was, that it was one shelf down from the professor’s copy. I’m thinking that the stack it’s on is for the professors’ personal books which are on course reserve, and that it got shelved there instead of with the rest of the library books. But I could be wrong. They might have their course reserves set up differently than my library. He looked at me in surprise and I told him I work in a library and know how course reserves can get messed up, plus that I was the last one to check it out.

Now if I could find all the books that we are discovered are missing from doing inventory at my library, I’d be very happy. So many are missing. But what’s weird is that every time I give students the list of the missing books to go look for, every single time they find more books that were missing that others had looked for. Long ago, I thought it was one student saying a book is missing, but found out that wasn’t the case by looking at the pages and seeing who initialed them. Now my suspicion is that the books were “checked out” but were not properly checked out in the system, so they weren’t registered on the patron’s account. Why else are books constantly found every time I have sent them out to look for them since we discovered them missing a year ago (I’ve done this around 5 times now)? One of those mysteries that will be unsolved. Maybe there are gremlins in addition to the ghost.

5B: Reflection on Readings

In the “Conducting a Reference Interview” book (page 1-2), it states that in any type of interview, the interviewer and the interviewee need to have a common purpose for the interview to go well. At the same time, they will also have opposed purposes. The book gives an example of a student asking for a classic to read. The librarian suggests to him “War and Peace.” The librarian want to educate the student. But this defeats the student’s intention. He doesn’t have the time to read Tolstoy’s work and then write a book report on it. This is a no-no in library science. The whole point of a reference interview is to find out exactly what the patron wants, not suggest to them other things, or suggest to them things that sidetrack them from what they really need to know. I always do what I can to get patrons what they want. I don’t really go further beyond that, unless I show them how to do things, if there are more than one ways of doing something. Sometimes the person doesn’t even want to know that and is trying to walk away from me. I have one coworker who will sit with someone for an hour, giving them all sorts of information. She is a fountain of information and a lot of what she talks about is interesting, but some of it is actually sidetracking from what someone wants. Sometimes I go and eavesdrop and observe the transaction to make sure that the patron doesn’t want to get away; sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.

The book also talks about the 6 common causes of communication accidents. Number 1 is not acknowledging the user. It states that the librarian must “establish immediate eye contact with users by acknowledging their presence thorough eye contact and other immediacy behaviors” (page 15). The academic librarian I interviewed for my customer service observation did not do that. She glanced at me and then said “Hi” as she turned back to her computer screen. I thought that that was kind of rude. The book states that “looking down at work on the desk rather than up to catch the user’s eye says, in effect, that the librarian is too busy to be approached” (page 50). That is EXACTLY how I felt when I walked up to her. Of course, it didn’t help that the desk was so high that I could rest my arms on it while standing. It created a physical barrier between us, which further impeded the reference interview transactions; another thing the book talks about, in regards to physical layouts.

As part of the requirement for our blog this time around, we had to go borrow the book from course reserve at the library. To do this, you walk up to the desk, tell them you need a book on course reserve, tell them the class number (SI 647) and then tell them which title you need. They then find the information you supplied them and find out the location of the book so they can retrieve it for you so that you can check the book out. Well, I’ve done this 3 times so far this semester. And twice, it was kind of a disaster (in my opinion). Normally, a student comes up and says they need a course reserve, or that you (the desk) have a book their professor gave them. You then ask them for the course number. And then when you get it, you ask which title they need if there is more than one book on reserve for that class. Pretty simple. Except it’s not. It’s not simple all the time because the students don’t always know what they need (like in reference interviews). Twice when I asked for SI 647, they told me they couldn’t find it; there were no books on course reserve for that class. I told them both times that there is because I looked it up in Mirlyn myself. I told the one girl to look up the instructor. The other girl asked me for the name of the course. The name of the course is the last thing I ever ask someone for. I always ask for course number, instructor, book title, author, then as a last resort the name of the class. I have found that patrons never know the name of the class. They tell me they know it but when I can’t find any info, I ask for their syllabus (half the time they don’t have it, if they know what it is) and discover that the name of the course is not what they thought it was. Sometimes they only know the name of the book or author and nothing else about the class. So as I know I know what I’m talking about, I have assumed that the students at the desk are new and don’t know what they are doing because they can’t find the course (it could be that they are not in course reserves in Mirlyn). I definitely now think they don’t know what they are doing because they have lost the textbook. I was the last person to check the book out. I turned it in at 2:43pm on Monday the 26^th. So who knows what they did with it.

5A: Reflection on Class 9-27-16

In the beginning of class, we got into our blog groups to discuss our customer service observation paper. I was surprised to learn that nobody had observed the same kinds of patterns or themes. I had written about customer service/approachability and the physical layout of the places. The one thing that we did have in common though, and so did the rest of the class, was that we all expected better customer service transactions. Not very many of us had follow-up questions from the worker. Follow-up questions are where a person is invited to come back in case they need further help. The worst customer service I had out of the four places was at the academic library. That surprised me. Librarians are trained to perform customer service, so why did it suck? Some of the others also had bad transactions at the libraries. For some reason, there is some kind of disconnect. You go to library school, learn what NOT to do, learn customer service skills, and yet once you have the librarian job, you do what you were told not to do and have poor customer service skills. WHY?! It’s the same thing involving the teaching of history in schools. In elementary through high school you learn a certain set of facts: Paul Revere warned the colonials that the British were coming, Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492 and was the first person to discover the Americas. You get to college, and EVERYTHING, I mean pretty much EVERYTHING you ever learned about history is a LIE!!! Paul Revere was NOT the ONLY person to ride out and warn others about the British coming. Furthermore, the colonials did not call them the British (because the colonists themselves were British). Columbus was not the first person to discover America. Leif Erickson and his men had traveled to the Americas hundreds of years beforehand. So you go to college and learn the truth, but then when you go and teach history in the schools, you tell the students the same thing that you had first learned, all of which is a lie. Again, WHY?! What is up with this disconnect of going to college, learning how to do something or about something, and then once you have your job, you totally ignore what you learned in college. It does not make sense, at all.

One thing that has come up in class a couple of times is the name, Stuart Smalley. The professor and some classmates keep quoting him so I decided to look him up. I found out he is a fictional character from Saturday Night Live. The comedian who created him was Al Franken, who is now a senator for Minnesota. I find that funny; a comedian becomes a senator. I wonder if anybody can take him seriously. US politics sure do need a variety of people instead of the corrupt, stuffy politicians who need to retire.

One thing we discussed is that people will never go up to the reference desk and admit something personal, like “I have breast cancer, am I going to survive?” Instead, a person will say it is their friend who has the cancer. This is very true. I do this myself sometimes when I am buying something at the store. If someone asks me why I am buying a toy, I will be like “Oh, I am buying it for my nieces”, when in reality I am buying it for myself. I do not want to admit I have a wolf stuffed animal collection because I do not need to be accused of being childish. Or that I play video games (used to, no time anymore). For some reason, people think if you are not a teenager, then playing video games is childish, yet people older than me play them.

At the end of the class, we had a reference question to answer. It was a very fun exercise, and actually illustrates questions that reference librarians really do get every once in a while. And shows that if reference librarians do not have any knowledge of the question or knowledge of a source that could provide them with the answer then they could have a heck of a time finding the answer to a patron’s question. The question we were asked was this:  “I just heard that there was a president that had a top-secret operation over 4^th of July weekend one time. His moustache covered up the incision. Is this true? Which president was it? What happened?” I had heard of this once a long time ago, but I could not remember who it was and what had happened. Just putting in search terms for “president, moustache, 4^th of July operation” does not bear any results. I probably would have gone to Wikipedia and searched for every president, but my friend got it right away by going to the NPR website. The answer is Grover Cleveland. He had a tumor on his jaw. And that tumor and a piece of Cleveland’s jaw are tucked away in a museum that has also collected parts of Einstein’s brain. It is one thing to collect something that once belonged to a president, but a tumor? Gross.