Help Me to Help You
Today at the PL (Public Library), I had a patron who was really trying to wear me down. Well, maybe she wasn’t TRYING exactly…but she was succeeding nonetheless. The problem that I had with this particular patron is one that I have encountered with other patrons before…but only since I began my misadventures in Public LibraryLand. Before I go much further, let me recreate the scenario for you:
Library Guy: Hello…may I help you?
Patron: Yes, I’d like to see your business books.
LG: Alright, that could cover a fairly broad area…what area of business were you interested in?
Patron: Just business, in general.
LG: So, you’re not interested in one particular aspect of business, like starting a business or…?
Patron: No.
At this point, there really isn’t a whole lot that I can do for this patron. She was not willingly giving up enough information for me to adequately help her. To continue asking questions would have resulted in a Merry-Go-Round scenario…I would continue to ask similar questions and she would continue to fend them off as though there were going to do her bodily harm. There is no one “business” section in the library – business, in very broad terms, could easily fall into two different areas. In the end, instead of verbally beating the information out of her, I took her to the one business area that is generally the favored of the two. I have no idea if she ever found what she was looking for.
This, my dear readers, is what I call the breakdown of the reference interview. If you are not a resident of LibraryLand, let me briefly explain the reference interview concept. You see, the patron comes to the librarian seeking information of some sort. It is the librarian’s job to determine exactly what the patron needs. Patrons, like the one in our example, often like to speak in very broad terms. “Where is your business section?”, “Where is your history section?” The librarian, therefore, asks further questions of the patron in an attempt to direct the patron to the best and most relevant source of information. However, sometimes, that just doesn’t work. On more than one occasion, I’ve had patrons get hostile with me when I try to narrow their question down. “Just tell me where the animal section is, PLEASE!” (Okay, I added the “please” part…that’s usually not present in that particular situation.) And then, sometimes, we have the Merry-Go-Round scenario. The thing about this is that I never had this problem in my previous life as an academic librarian. If a student came up to the reference desk with the general question of “Where is your chemistry section?”, they would always submit to questions to let me help them find what they were actually looking for. Always. Maybe I was just lucky in that regard. Therefore, the frequency with which patrons in Public LibraryLand refuse to submit to even brief reference interviews surprised me. After a year, I still haven’t quite gotten used to it.
I also haven’t gotten used to the idea that I am apparently supposed to be a real-life version of Google and return search results for them in .12 seconds. But that’s a topic for another time…
