A couple weeks ago, in the process of describing how he decided whether to let a library customer use a staff shredder, Brian Herzog of Swiss Army Librarian mentioned his library's yes-based policy.
This idea appeals to my better nature, even though it requires a shift of perspective for those of us who are rule-followers (and rule-enforcers) by temperament.
As I've written elsewhere, yes-based policy humanizes the relationship between staff and customers.
In his earlier post, Brian wrote:
The culture in this library is to put customer service first, to give patrons a good library experience, with "getting to yes" as our unwritten rule....
[What] rules we do have are considerably flexible, [and] different staff would enforce [them] in different ways.... [This] situation allowed some patrons to "shop around" amongst desk staff until they got the answer they wanted, and this is what finally caused a blow up.
We...decided we needed to ensure that patrons received consistent service, no matter who helped them. We rewrote a portion of our...policy, with the goal of making it clear and fair, while making sure it allowed for the highest degree of service but still punished those who flagrantly abused the system....
The beginning of the new policy contains this preamble:
This library makes certain assumptions when dealing with the public:
- The staff of this library works to “get to yes” with patrons.
- The vast majority of patrons are honest; therefore, we take patrons at their word.
- Patrons appreciate courtesy and understanding. Gentle reminders, along with compassion toward extenuating circumstances, are used to prompt people to return overdue items....
The goal is still serving patrons, but the more black-and-white desk staff now have an up-to-date policy in writing to guide them....
I'm generally a rules-based person, but serving patrons as well as possible should always come first.
It's a fine line between completely meeting one patron's needs and also serving the next patron in line equally and fully, but having a written yes-based policy goes a long way towards making everyone happy.
Worth considering.
Brian Herzog of Swiss Army Librarian writes:
This year, my library planned a program on using ebooks with library resources for the first Saturday in January.
The plan was for me to talk about Overdrive, and give live downloading demos for a Kindle, iPad, and Nook. Also, we invited a sales associate from the local Radio Shack to come talk about the non-library aspects of ereaders - buying ebooks, the differences between the devices themselves, and hopefully answer a few hardware tech support questions.
Brian's post is worth a read.
:-)
Thanks to Brian Herzog on Swiss Army Librarian, I've just learned about the neat blog of Mary Kelly and Holly Hibner, Awful Library Books.
This site is a collection of library holdings that we find amusing and maybe questionable for libraries trying to maintain a current and relevant collection. Contained in this site are actual library holdings.
No libraries are specifically mentioned to protect our submitters who might disagree with a particular collection policy. (A good librarian would probably be able to track down the holding libraries without too much trouble anyway…)
Among the features of this blog is a Will Weed for Food page. I encourage you to explore the site and, if you wish, to submit entries.
We would love submissions. Feel free to email us any scans of covers: submit@awfullibrarybooks.net. JPGs preferred, PDFs welcome but least-preferred.
Here's the entry for December 6th: "Ham Shack, Baby." [Extra points for getting the allusion in the post title.]
:-)
Brian Herzog, on Swiss Army Librarian, has posted a thoughtful checklist which I think would work very well to guide one's thinking in doing a reference interview.
Brian writes: "Some sort of checklist or decision tree is probably covered in most library school reference text books, but I thought I’d take a crack at it. Of course, any checklist like this could vary widely by library, depending on available resources, but the following few questions might help make sure all bases are covered consistently."
Here are his questions, but you ought to read the whole post. for the details:
- Are you sure you understand the question?
- Is the patron looking for a specific item?
- Is the patron looking for a subject?
- Is the question about something local?
- Is your answer still “no” or “I don’t know” - what else can you do?
I think this gives very good starting points.
Today I had one of Swiss Army Librarian Brian Herzog's Reference Question of the Week experiences.
A young woman came up asking to find information about boxer Peter B. Jackson.
(Granted, it was another case of a mom doing homework for her kid, but that's another story.)
As you can see from the link, she'd already Googled Jackson, and the two-page Wikipedia article was what she had found and printed out.
(She could have also gotten this and this and this and this...but in a sense telling you that spoils my story. Anyway, this was one of those folks who grab the first Google hit and quit.)
She came to me from the main lobby saying, "They told me you might have something besides this." Ah, the omniscient, omnipotent They.
Since I assumed—oops!—that she had already exhausted Google, I turned to our Gale online Biography Resource Center. All that gave me was an entry which listed citations in lots of "Further Reading" print sources like Biography Index.
My initial reaction was to see this as a dead end, since there was nothing substantive which I could print out quickly for my digital immigrant customer.
Then this little voice said, "You are in a big city library reference department. You have print resources and an MLIS. Get them out of mothballs and use them!"
I searched our online catalog and found that we actually have Biography Index.
(You would think a reference librarian would know his own print collection—but when, besides right now, does anyone ever actually ask us to search it?)
Duh!
We searched for this entry:
Biography Index. A cumulative index to biographical material in books and magazines. Volume 11: September, 1976-August, 1979. New York: H. W. Wilson Co., 1980.
That led us to this:
JACKSON, Peter, 1861-1901, Australian boxer
Langley, Tom. Life of Peter Jackson, champion of Australia; il. by Rigby Graham. Vance Harvey. '74 80p pors
Oops, a source we don't have and cannot get through Interlibrary Loan in time for her kid's *ahem* Monday assignment deadline.
But then I scanned on down the "Further Readings" list:
American National Biography. 24 volumes. Edited by John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Ah!
Once we searched Peter B. Jackson in that source, we found a two-page article which I helped the customer photocopy.
The bonus: she said several times, "I really appreciate what you're doing for me."
So...once more a real person managed to overcome my resistance to making a real effort at customer service, and in the process I got excited about doing the reference search the good old way, as I originally learned to do it from Linda Walling and her colleagues at the University of South Carolina.
Hooray!
Because she knows I like to follow Brian Herzog's Swiss Army Librarian, my friend Trapdoor Spider showed me the following:
Now, granted, I sometimes feel as if my customers expect me to be this versatile, but...
...how in the heck do you actually hold it to do anything?!
Mike
BTW, note the price: a mere $1,400 (plus $6.95 for gift wrapping).
Wow! This guy gets some really interesting questions!
Swiss Army Librarian had a customer who found a plaque made of stone in the woods with characters painted onto it. He went online and found Omniglot.com and, by looking at the alphabets there, decided they must be Runic characters. In front of the plaque was a little container which he didn’t open, but he photographed the whole area and....
See Brian Herzog's post for the rest of the story...and check out Omniglot.com.
Mike
Yesterday, Brian Herzog published a very interesting post on Swiss Army Librarian.
He had set out to represent graphically the complexity of flow in the library services hierarchy. Here's what he came up with:
I'll let him speak for himself:
I was thinking about library services, and why some good ideas get implemented while others don’t, and why libraries offer some things that seem to be of no use to anyone. This started me down the path of getting to the root of “why” and “how,” which I came to refer to as “What is Necessary” and “What is Possible.”
Check out his blog post.
Mike
Since Samhain (aka Hallowe'en), things have been way too busy to keep up with blogging, what with the election, the imminent rollout of an expanded Ask a Librarian live chat reference service for Jacksonville Public library—not to mention the annual it's-November-and-all-the-overlapping-multitasking-library-projects-are-coming-due-at-the-same-time-stress-induced throat and chest cold...hackhackhack....
So...here's a mushed together list of very interesting blog posts, not in any particular order, but worth checking out.
How's that for a post full of info and links...and NO original material? (Unless you count the it's-November...etc....)
Mike
