September 29, 2016

The subtitle for this blog is not a joke.   I'm one whose temperament is most suited to solitary intellectual and creative pursuits, or to interesting conversation and recreation with a few close friends.

I started The Surly Librarian in 2008 as a cynic's challenge to myself: Can I turn my private grouchiness into essays for library professionals, but essays that might actually be encouraging?

Take a look at "Customer Service for curmudgeons" for one of my early attempts.
     Attitude adjustment

         (10/29/2009)

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September 29, 2016, is my last day of work with Jacksonville Public Library.

Since I admire all my library colleagues across the profession as resilient, brilliant people who "have each others' backs" despite any yanking around they have to survive, it seems like I should revisit some of this blog for their sake.

Some of these posts are dated...discouraging "news reportage" about budget cuts...but more are meant as genuine cheer leading for library folk...though, granted, out of left field (see Daikon Radishes) .

I take a couple of themes very seriously:

• First, the quality of human interactions between library professionals and their clients is far more important than collections or technology
• Second, the primary mandate of public libraries is to ensure free access to essential information, together with instruction on how to use it effectively, to those who cannot otherwise get or afford it (see Poor Richard Redux: A Manifesto).

These selected rants—and the whole blog, for that matter—are meant to get at the heart of genuine librarianship, which I believe requires authenticity, integrity and compassion.

And a sardonic sense of humor....

2013

• Our war against ourselves 7/19/2013

2012

• Resilience 11/21/2012
• Black Border 9/9/2012
• Phyllis Diller: 1917-2012 8/22/2012
• Can I Go Home Now? - Deluxe Edition 3/24/2012
• "Today, average is officially over" 1/25/2012

2011

• The wrong conversation 9/4/2011
• I have to ask.... 5/5/2011
• Market Fundamentalism 1/31/2011

2010

• Statutes & Statues 7/14/2010
• Community Integration 4/23/2010
• It's the infrastructure 2/5/2010

2009

• Attitude adjustment 10/29/2009
• Library instruction 3/24/2009
• Ask a Librarian 2/4/2009

2008

• Deeper Thoughts 11/18/2008
• Daikon Radishes 11/15/2008
• Summing up 9/14/2008
• Maurice Sendak 9/12/2008
• Digital Refugees 8/16/2008
• Digital Immigrants 8/15/2008
• Post-capitalism 7/18/2008
• Poor Richard Redux 7/8/2008
• Customer Service for curmudgeons 6/28/2008
• Neo-Luddite Web 2.0 6/25/2008http://surlylib.blogspot.com/2012/08/phyllis-diller-1917-2012.html

Swiss Army Librarian: Yes-based library policy

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.

Can I go home now? - Deluxe Edition

I'll try to tell this story coherently...but if I start to blather, be kind. Mercury is retrograde and the Moon is in caacaa.

First, you have to understand that this is not actually my sixth day in a row at work.

For "human resources" reasons which have to do mainly with denying weekend workers overtime, our municipal payroll week runs from Saturday to Friday. Probably works okay for most Monday to Friday city employees, but the library opens seven days a week. That means we all have to alternate working Saturdays, and once every eight weeks we have to work a Sunday.

Long story short, according to HR, I am not working six days in a row this week. I am working Monday to Friday in one pay week...and Saturday in the next pay week.

Never mind that my body has to get up and drive here six days in a row.

Hour One. So anyway, here I am, a supervisor, preparing for opening hour at a public service desk. I notice that we can't log into the network which controls the public access computers. I call City IT. They say, "Yeah, we downloaded patches to all our servers last night, so it's taking a while to get them working."

[I've always loved this explanation. It worked okay before the patches, but now....]

I'm trying to print an OUT OF ORDER sign, while explaining to impatient customers what a server is and why I can't fix it right away, when one of our librarians calls out sick.

Saturdays are short-staffed, with everyone working five to six hours out of eight on desk, so this means a complicated scheduling fix...which I can't do here at the desk while I'm also explaining the esoterica of the Internet to a persistant young man and trying to get the desk computer...which is unconscionably slow...to bring up Word so that I can print a sign....

Hour Two. Now I'm on the out-of-the-way third floor lobby desk, where for some reason computer customers line up in droves, even when all the machines are obviously in use.

My colleague from the previous hour hands me the phone customer he's been trying to help for the last ten minutes and rushes off to relieve someone else in our call center.

I'm not logged into our customer accounts app or anything else yet, so I ask the caller to hold on. Once I'm ready, I learn that he cannot log into his account remotely through our website, because "every PIN you people give me doesn't work!"

[Why, oh why, did folks back in the 20th century claim that machines—computers in particular—would be "labor-saving devices"? Surely it was only so they could sell them to us.]

I open the caller's account, change the PIN, and try accessing his account through our website myself. No go. I change the PIN again. This time it works, so I give it to him and tell him to try it.

"It doesn't work."

We go in circles for several minutes, until I discover that the caller has bookmarked the login page...which, of course, "saves" PINs. I walk him through closing the browser, reopening it, going to our home page, Clicking on MY LIBRARY ACCOUNT...which he cannot find...to get back to a fresh login page....

While this is all going on, three customers have accumulated around the public access sign-in scanner, and a fourth is standing at my desk, waiting to ask for help, and...

...up walks our resident third floor lobby schizophrenic, the one who ritualistically purifies the whole area before logging into a computer.

In an angry voice she announces, "I was the one who resurrected Jesus Christ last night! Not YOU!"

Three customers walk away briskly.

Can I please go with them?

Time warp

Ever notice how Friday and Saturday afternoons working in the library....

...the clooocksss ssstooooppp mooooviiiinngggg?

Statutes and statues

As I've repeatedly suggested, sometimes the hardest part of doing an effective reference interview is overcoming my own annoyance with or even prejudice against customers who don't know what they're asking for.

Apparently, I have a not-so-latent, A-student resentment toward people who not only don't know things but don't know how to find out for themselves. As I told a colleague: "Kinda makes you wonder why I became a librarian, doesn't it?"

Fortunately, customers keep walking up to the service desk, whether or not I want them to, and they keep asking for help, whether or not they know what they are talking about. Sometimes it can make life interesting...if I pull back on my own choke collar and really pay attention.
One day recently, I was double-teamed by two friends who walked up, both of them with confounding questions, the original versions of which bore only a superficial relationship to the information they each actually needed.

Customer One said he needed help to find out the statute of limitations on a law.

I groaned to myself for several reasons.

First, even if I pretend to know how to search legal questions, I know that state statutes are unconscionably difficult to search, even when you know where to start. Even if I could find the law, finding a statute of limitations could be a labyrinthine process.

Second, from experience I've learned that the typical customer knows most of what he thinks he knows about law from TV. TV reduces law to dramatic clichés and misinterpreted urban legends (just as it does every other subject), and viewers grab hold of what they think they heard and insist that they know the real facts—never mind that they've just asked a professionally trained librarian to help them *harrumph!*.

All this meant that, instead of beginning with an online search, I started walking Customer One over toward the print version of the Florida Statutes, partly to stall while I asked further questions, partly so that I could show him just how labyrinthine a search we might have to do...if he actually needed to know about a statute of limitations, which I doubted.

"Well, which law are we looking for? What's you situation?"

"I'm trying to rent an apartment, and the landlord refuses because I did time in prison thirty-five years ago. I want to find out what the statute of limitations on that law is."

Ah!

I know that "statute of limitations" refers to how long after a crime a person can still be prosecuted for the crime, not to how long after incarceration a person who is trying to gain employment, housing, etc., can legally be denied. We're actually looking for something else.

"In that case," I said, "it shouldn't matter what crime you were convicted of or how much time you did or when. The question is, can a landlord deny you housing?"

"Yeah."

"I think what we really need to do is find out who can help you out with fair housing matters. Let's go back to my desk while I hunt."

Through a series of steps, I managed to find the local office of the U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

I called that office, identified myself, and explained that, though I knew I might be calling the wrong office, I had a customer who needed help with a "fair housing" issue. When I briefly described the situation, the HUD staffer hummed and hawed, yet she agreed to talk with my customer.

I winced when he started all over again at the very beginning of his problem presentation to me.

However, the HUD staffer apparently knew how to do reference interviews, too. She must have told him what steps he needed to take, whom he needed to talk with, etc., because he finally thanked her, said goodbye, and shook my hand.

Customer Two.

"There's a statue in a public park that really needs to come down 'cause it's offensive, and I want you to tell me how to get it down!"

Silly me! Because I know and like it, the first statue I thought of which some people might find offensive was the "Winged Victory" in Jacksonville's Memorial Park.

However, I knew not to ask what statue or what park. Don't need to go there. Not my business. What I did needed to ask was what he'd already done...if anything.

"Well, I thought about calling __________________," he said, naming a local politician who thrives on controversy.

"Yeah, that might work," I deadpanned. "Let's see whom you would need to contact in the City's Department of Recreation and Community Service, since they manage the parks. That's where you would first want to file a complaint."

"Okay...."

Maybe the reader can find a phone number for Parks on this website. (Tell me in a comment.) I gave up after several minutes of being led in circles through different links.

I apologized and directed Customer Two to 630-CITY, Jacksonville's helpline.

"This is the City's helpline. They will know whom you should talk to and how you should file your complaint. Sorry I can't find the direct phone number. It used to be on the City's website, but I guess they've changed that."

I grrred to myself silently, but, fortunately, my customer was satisfied with this alternative.

So, two customers whom I didn't feel like helping, because they didn't know what they really needed, challenged me—without knowing they had—to be a real librarian for real people.

It would be nice if I eventually learn this lesson for good, since it keeps coming round on the wheel.

:-)

The customer within

Recently, I had one of those moments when reality sneaks past my prejudices, and my petty resentments toward customers transform into wonder.

On this occasion, a man whom my eye stereotyped as a thirty-ish, blue-collar guy approached the Non-Fiction "Ask Here" desk, carrying a library basket of books.

(Had I been paying more attention, the juxtaposition of "blue-collar guy" with "basket of books" would already have been subverting my expectations.)

My customer was seeking a book he said he'd seen before on our shelves, one he thought was called American Christian Heritage, about the “biblical basis” of our nation's founding documents. He thought the author was David Barton, whom he sees frequently on TV pushing the so-called "originalist" doctrine of Constitutional interpretation.

"Oh, great!" I thought, muttering to myself about "ideologically driven revisionist history."

I usually manage to hide my annoyance over certain research topics, though customers can be good at reading the nonverbals. In this case, though, the guy was openly friendly and curious, so I managed to ignore my political biases and do a professional search.

My usual strategy is to narrate to my customer what I'm doing, with my screen turned so that he or she can watch the process. This helps me to teach customers how online searching is done, as well as to explain why computer searches don't always work very well.

"You and I know what we're looking for, but the computer doesn't know what these words mean. It's just trying to match shapes, and we have to guess which shapes (search strings) will trick it into finding what we need."

This method also takes some pressure off of me, since I'm demonstrating my actual efforts to help the customer.

This time, unfortunately, we found no such title in the catalog, with or without that author name. Nor any similar titles, nor titles with variations on the relevant search terms.

I told my customer I believed he had seen a book with something like that title, but that we would have to search in other ways.

Full disclosure: I could not be a reference librarian without Google and Amazon. How else to cast the net wide enough perhaps to catch something, the name of which the customer doesn't know?

Amazon found fifteen titles by David Barton, all in that realm of "Bible-based" reinterpretation of American history and principles…but nothing like the title my customer was seeking.

We went back to our catalog to search David Barton again, but no luck.

"Oh, well," said the blue-collar guy. "How about Josephus?"

I blinked.

"Um, okay…," I said, hunting up the Dewey numbers for several versions of the Complete Works.

As we started walking back to the 930s, my customer explained that he used not to read at all, but that recently he'd gotten rid of his cable.

"It's fascinating," he said. "There's so much to learn!"

I fell over myself making polite affirmations to cover my surprise.

At the shelves, we looked at several editions, until he found one with print large enough for him to read.

"Thanks a lot!" he said.

"Sure. Thank you."

I walked back toward the desk, noticing how my conceptual boundaries and expectations had shifted.

It doesn't matter if I approve of the sort of reading my customer wants to do. He has chosen to put himself on a path of expanding his own awareness through reading.

If I can't trust that process, I probably should quit being a librarian.

So…am I talking about librarianship as a spiritual discipline?

Could be.

"Not Always Right"

Okay, I know this is naughty, but...(The Customer Is) Not Always Right.

:-)

Proper community integration

Our library administration is gradually phasing in a staff development approach which uses the Leadership Challenge model designed by Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner.

The key premise of the model is horizontal leadership: the notion that each person, regardless of position or rank, has the potential to improve the organization by sharing innovative ideas and problem-solving expertise…and that management at every level should invite and make use of such contributions.

For this fiscal year, each of us has been asked to develop an Action Plan of personal goals and objectives, based on one of the Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership. Supervisors can then use these plans both to mentor and to learn from their staff.

I've had the good fortune through most of my working life to have supervisors who already practiced this sort of collaborative relationship, so I've welcomed my present organization's mandate that staff and supervisors learn how to work together in this way.

I want to share a discussion with my colleague Eric Soriano which began as an email exchange about his current Action Plan goal, yet which deepened to consider a core challenge for helping professionals in any setting.

Eric joined us from another library branch a few months back, and I’ve let him know I always value the perspective of new eyes on old subjects. In an email comment, he wrote about seeking balance, so that he doesn’t “come on too strong” with his new ideas.

I’m really conscious about this as my previous training as a Jesuit volunteer was high on proper community integration.

That phrase, proper community integration, caught my interest. Here’s part of my reply:

I like this concept. It recalls to me a skill or sensibility…which seems to be crucial in any helping profession. One might call it scaling one’s helping interventions to the readiness of the other person (or group) to receive.

Scaling is difficult to do, because one has to attend carefully not only to what the other person is (sometimes inarticulately) asking for, but also to what that person is ready to understand and to be able to use.

My 15 years in clinical counseling taught me a lot along these lines. It was essential to meet my client where he/she was, not where I thought he/she ought to be.… I had to tune into “what’s going on at the moment that the client might be willing and able to nudge in a more healthy direction.”

This sort of scaling requires me to set aside both my judgment of the client (or customer) and my judgment of what would be the “best” solution/answer.

It’s tricky. We have to be able to read the signs that our customers feel they are moving in a constructive direction…even if we believe they could have gone much farther (or in a better direction).

Eric’s response was to share a story from his native Philippines which he has given me permission to include here:

I’ve been blessed to see and experience the value of community integration in a cultural perspective. I actually learned it the hard way when I was assigned to be a fisher folk community organizer in a far-flung impoverished coastal community in 1997.

Straight out of a fancy private college…I thought I was fully equipped to go in there and give presentations on project management and environmental awareness. Well, none of these men reached high school so someone like me should automatically get their attention.

I was dead wrong. Only a couple of men attended the first meeting I organized and I felt sooo frustrated thinking all my slides and graphs were put to waste.

That night, I walked near the beach, then saw a group of about a dozen men huddled in a small hut and a tiny gas lamp. Lo and behold, the same no-show fishermen with a big bottle of gin in the middle! They fell silent after seeing me.

Then, after about the longest 2 minutes ever, one of them mustered the courage to offer me a shot of their drink. I was mad and initially tempted to give a lengthy lecture on how they waste their limited resources on alcohol when they barely have anything to eat! But for some reason, the spirit (not the alcohol) moved me to not say a word and to accept the offer.

Then it happened. A few more rounds later they started telling their stories, and I learned how cold it was to venture the open seas of the Pacific at night and drinking gin was their only way for their bodies to cope. I ended up drunk, but the lesson learned is the kind of hangover I don’t mind lingering.

It may be [that] learning their language…, actively listening, [being] truly interested/engaged in people and respecting group dynamics/traditions/culture, while still trying to be an agent of positive change,…represent universal values worth giving importance in any organization—even the library.

Easier said than done, of course.

Some of those techniques are trainable, but some you just need to have. Like, how would you train someone to have genuine concern for others and truly love service?

Personally, I just beg for the grace to see every human transaction in [our library] as a blessing I can learn from. I appreciate the unique gifts of my colleagues and even the nuttiest of customers bring an extra zest to my work experience as I continue my journey growing in this profession.

And our story continues....

I'm grateful to Eric, both for triggering this discussion and for sharing a story which resonates with me and recalls to me similar stories of my own.

In case it's not obvious, we are talking here—again—about real, humble customer service. We're talking about exercising horizontal leadership by collaborating with our customers, rather than "patronizing" them.

We're talking about doing genuinely thoughtful, constructive reference interviews, about leaving behind one's own pride or annoyance or boredom or frustration to be with our customers where they are when they come to us.

So many times I want to say "Can I go home now?"

But when I allow myself (metaphorically, of course) to get drunk with my customers, I find out things they know and experience which, though it would not have occurred to me, are deeply relevant to the information search they bring to me.

And so, as Eric says, our story continues….


Addendum: This whole discussion recalls to me a powerful book by Ram Dass and Paul Gorman called How Can I Help? Stories and Reflection on Service. It doesn't speak specifically to librarianship, yet it's one of richest sources I know for opening up the heart of service.

What? Search the print sources?!

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!

Vulnerability

This will probably be more than you wanted to know about me.

When I started this blog as a Learning 2.0 exercise, I was already a blogger of several years running.

In fact, I've been journaling in one form or another since high school (way back in another century). That means I have a private thirty-some-year archive of more about myself than even I want to know.

The important point, though, is that for me writing is a way of learning about myself. Journaling in the form of a blog is sometimes even more so.

Any writer cleans up his act when he's being autobiographical in print. However, when I started blogging, I challenged myself to tell interesting stories about myself in a way that

• was humorous and (one hopes) entertaining
• was honest, even when not literally factual
• revealed to me, by revealing to my readership, something about myself which I hadn't wanted to have to admit.

The something relevant to librarianship that's been on my mind for the past few months, the something which has been subverting my usual ability to "be professionally nice" to strangers [see blog subtitle], is my chronic sense of VULNERABILITY.

By "vulnerability" I don't mean the introverted temperament I described in "Customer service for curmudgeons." That preference for solitary activities—or for conversation with a few close friends—has always been part of my life, yet it hasn't prevented me from being very effective in a series of service careers: library and business administrative secretarial positions, prison counselor, librarian.

The old friend who first taught me how to intepret the Meyers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator also helped me to appreciate the paradox of the Extrovert-Introvert scale, and to understand why I, an introvert, could do so well in professions which call for strong skills at social interaction.

"An introvert," he said, "can watch an extrovert and learn how to behave in an extroverted manner...at least till he runs out of energy. However, when an extrovert watches an introvert, all he sees is someone sitting there."

[Note that this also applies to non-readers who watch someone read.]

The vulnerability I'm writing about is something else. You could call it "thinned-skinnedness," except that's not quite it. The issue is personal boundaries and how strong they are, how permeable yet resilient they are.

Perhaps the more relevant term is empathy. Those of us who are sensitive to the wants and feelings of others are also vulnerable to them. At our best we hone the skills of being just open enough to others to be helpful, without being so open that our own boundaries are invaded.

Which brings us to burnout.

I went to library school in 1999, after resigning in despair from the clinical counseling career which I loved, yet which had burned me out (due to a right-wing political "coup" in my home state which undid fifteen years of prison reform).

Well, we discovered in "Intro to Computers in Libraries" that almost half of the 60+ people in the course were either burned out social workers or burned out school teachers. We might have taken that as a warning. At the time we all just thought it was funny.

:-\

Now I struggle daily as one anxious, demanding person after another comes to the Ask Here desk, needing help to seek and apply for email accounts, unemployment benefits, jobs, food stamps..."free money." Though this is probably an exaggeration, it seems as if the majority of them are not just digital immigrants but digital refugees.

And I resent them. I catch myself wandering around the stacks muttering, "I HATE this job!" I want them to leave me alone so that I can "get my work done."

What's going on here?

It's taken me months to catch on. Just recently I realized: I've lost the knack of helping-while-sustaining-my-boundaries. As soon as someone comes to the Ask Here desk, I'm feeling as if my privacy has been violated.

Whoa! That's burnout.

And for me, it's a warning of a deeper challenge. I'm realizing how much—way more than I thought—the scars of my earlier burnout have gotten in the way of genuinely practicing empathy.

For the nine years I've been a librarian, I've thought of myself in the way I did when I was a competent clinical counselor: as an open, caring helper with well-maintained personal boundaries.

For the past half a year or so, though, I've felt much more like an old grouch who's lost his sense of humor. Worse, like a "helper" who is at best patronizing and at worst spiteful.

Not what I want.

"Well, counselor. Now that you have a diagnosis, what are you going to do about it?"

"No. The question is, 'What are you going to do about it?' "

I've already scattered clues to myself all through this blog, especially in the "Can I Go Home Now?" pieces and way back in that original, June 28, 2008, curmudgeon piece:

Fortunately, though, they sometimes manage to get through to me as actual people. It might be when they present their questions. It might be later, when my resentment of their "interrupting" me shifts into professional eagerness to search out the solution...

...which sometimes shifts into a genuine exchange of satisfaction with a real human being, when we both realized that we have tracked down—or at least stumbled across—the best answer to the query.

Even though it makes for good jokes in the workroom or on a blog, I'm not too proud of my curmudgeonly resentment of customers.

I am grateful, though, that they insist upon becoming human beings, so that I have to become human, too.

I guess that's another reason I'm in this line of work.

It ain't easy, being human.

Meanwhile, I'm affirming that the new assignment which I've been dreading—managing a neighborhood branch for five weeks while a colleague practices daddy-hood—may be the change of venue I need...especially since I slip out for a week's vacation in the middle of it.

We shall see.

As I said at the start, writing is a way of learning, especially writing I embolden myself to share with others.

Thank you for being readers.

And take a break. Nurse your own incipient burnout, if that's what's bugging you.

"They" are just "us" on the other side of the desk.

Take care,
Mike

Can I go home now? (Case #4)

When I whined about science project questions not too long ago, an unexpressed part of the complaint had to do with the weird mixture of disinterest and expectation I sometimes get from customers.

As in: "I'm not interested in doing this for myself. I expect you to do it for me."

Back in library school, my fantasy was to work in an academic library. I foolishly imagined that my patrons—what we used to call them before consumerism took over—would actually be interested, not only in learning things from the library, but in learning how to find things for themselves.

Instead, here I am in my ninth year in a public library, flipping burgers for customers.

Well, actually it's not that bad. I've learned to find real satisfaction in those exchanges with customers when I've connected them with essential help or when we both realize we've solved a puzzle together. Such transactions take me back to the best moments of my career as a prison counselor.

Still, my original fantasy continues to distract me: patrons who would "actually be interested...etc."

Here's my curmudgeon's philosophy of library customer service:

My job is to show customers how to use our tools and resources to find the answer—so that I won't have to do it for them next time.

Grumping aside, I actually do believe this.

If customers are dependent on someone else to find them what they need, we aren't doing our jobs as public library staff. Whenever I do a search, whether it's the online catalog or the Internet or our databases or our physical collection, I always "take them along." I turn my computer screen and make them watch while I narrate every step as I do it.

Sometimes it clicks with them, sometimes it doesn't.

Early in my public library career, I was at a regional branch which served kids from three local schools. The buses would dump them all in our parking lot at 3:30 every weekday, and they would tromp in, drop their backpacks with a crash on the nearest table or chair...and head for the computers.

Once in a while, one of them would come over to the reference desk with homework. Not to do it, but to get it done.

My all time worst case was a middle school girl who said to me, in a voice which was simultaneously annoyed and bored: "I have to do a two-page paper on physics. Would you show me all the websites on physics?"

After I stared at her and got no uptake, I started the usual reference interview, trying to help her narrow and specify her search subject.

"What sort of topics did your teacher suggest?"

"I don't know...."

"Okay...well, what sort of physics topics are you interested in?"

"I don't know...."

It went on like this for almost ten minutes!

Back on my first counseling job out of grad school, I went to my supervisor once to find out how long I should keep trying when a client wasn't making any effort.

"I never work harder than my clients," she said.

That has been my rule of thumb ever since. If I have a client, patient, patron, customer, what-have-you, who repeatedly goofs up but keeps on trying, I work. If I realize the person is waiting on me to "fix it," I stop and wait.

With my prison clients, I could say, "Hey, I go home at 4:30. You have to live here." In the library, "These things must be done delicately."

"Okay," I said to the middle schooler. "Let me get you signed onto a computer, and I'll show you how to search Google."

A somewhat better case occurred at the same branch. A mom came up to the desk with her kid in tow. (He was staring longingly at the row of PCs across the room).

"He has to find three articles for a biology paper," she said.

"Okay," I replied, speaking to the kid. "What's your paper topic?"

"Planaria," said the mom.

"Ah." I turned the screen so the kid could see it. "Maybe you could search our online science database."

Mom: "Would that have articles he could use?"

Me (to kid): "Yes, it has full text articles from dozens of different science research journals. Let me show you how to search it."

Finally the mom caught on.

"Listen to the man!" she said, swatting her kid on the shoulder. "He's trying to help you." She pulled a magazine out of her bag and walked away.

I don't remember whether I got very far with the kid, but at least I now had a "teaching moment."

The best recent example was actually that same science project question I complained about. Granted, the kid with the homework wasn't present. However, the mom and I really engaged with each other in redefining and targeting the search. She was happy with the titles I found, and she was particularly pleased to learn about our online databases—especially the fact that her daughter could continue the research remotely from her home PC.

What I have to keep reminding myself is this:

• I'm an old guy who's been working since 1968


• It's too early to retire (in this economy, it may always be *groan*)


• What I most want to spend my time on now—reading, writing, coffeehouse conversation, sitting in the sun—I'm unlikely to get paid for


• I don't want to have to satisfy an editor or a tenure committee to get paid


• I am actually very good at customer service (I know how to put the curmudgeon on hold and be a real human being with my customers)


• Sometimes I enjoy it.

Hmmm.... Does this mean I asked for the job?

Don't blame it on the turkey

Yeah, maybe this doesn't exactly seem like a library-related post, but I'm working in a library...well, let's say "present" in a library at the moment, and I can't seem to get back in gear.

Monday was hell. People out, both planned and unplanned. The new library associate NOT on the roster for the two-day training for new City employees...but then, we needed him, so maybe that wasn't so bad....

Oh, well....

Anyway, I was going to blame my sluggishness and un-customer servicey attitude on all the turkey and leftover turkey and leftover leftover turkey, but then I found this:

L-Tryptophan and Carbohydrates

L-tryptophan may be found in turkey and other dietary proteins, but it's actually a carbohydrate-rich (as opposed to protein-rich) meal that increases the level of this amino acid in the brain and leads to serotonin synthesis. Carbohydrates stimulate the pancreas to secrete insulin. When this occurs, some amino acids that compete with tryptophan leave the bloodstream and enter muscle cells. This causes an increase in the relative concentration of tryptophan in the bloodstream. Serotonin is synthesized and you feel that familiar sleepy feeling.

Sooo...I can't blame it on the turkey.

I know, I'll blame it on the customers.

>:-[

Deeper thoughts on "Case #3"

An exchange of teasing comments and email with our library system's training coordinator resulted from the previous post. This in turn led me to revisit some of the basic issues around which this blog revolves.

I first addressed this in "Customer service for curmudgeons":

I'm one of those introverted people whose temperament is most suited to solitary intellectual and creative pursuits, or to interesting conversation and recreation with a few close friends.

Probably library schools have a real challenge now when it comes to discerning which people, with which temperaments, would make good 21st century library professionals.

Back in my century [haha] it generally worked okay for introverted people to become librarians. The core concerns of the field were organizing information and being able to recover it. The skills of dealing with human beings weren't so central.

Now the whole field has shifted its focus from information to the customer's need for information. The very use of the term "customer" [ugh] underscores this reality.

As a 20th century curmudgeon, I personally regret this shift. To me it reflects a disturbing shift in what our culture values. Away from valuing the proactive processes involved in learning and doing critical thinking. Toward valuing the reactive processes of consumerism, because-we-can "innovation" and the marketplace.

However, the realities of institutional funding demand that libraries become "businesses" serving "consumers," giving priority to what they believe they want, rather than to what we know might be useful.

And this reality, in turn, demands that we become even better at doing what we used to call the reference interview. Because we do know what might be useful, and they don't (necessarily) know what they want. And if we can translate from their "want" to our "know," we can win them as customers.

Another way of looking at this—a way of shifting the focus back to the proactive role of librarianship—is to push against the tide of consumerism in a deliberate and professional manner. "You think you want that, but, look, wouldn't this be much more useful/rewarding/entertaining/informative to you?"

What a challenge!

Mike

Can I go home now? (Case #3)

There's no use pretending. I HATE science project questions!!!

Aside from the usual issues, like it's the kid's Mom doing the research, while the kid is (a) not there (b) playing on the computers (c) playing one of those hand held idiot boxes (d) staring off into space (e) all of the above,...

...and like the fact that teachers who assign these projects don't seem to do any preparatory instruction about (a) what a science project is (b) how to pick a doable topic (c) what constitutes useable research literature (d) how to go about finding it (e) whether the public library has anything on the topic to begin with (f) all of the above,...

...my main gripe is that the customers ALWAYS start at the wrong end.

The voice on the phone says: "My daughter is doing a science project on daikon radishes. We need five books on daikon radishes."

*biting my tongue*

"I suppose you need books on growing daikon, not cookbooks?"

"Yes."

"Well, I know we won't have books just on daikon, but let me do a catalog search."

daikon ---> no results
daikon and gardening ---> no results
chinese cabbage and gardening ---> no results
chinese vegetables and gardening ---> 2 books at another branch, both checked out

"As I suspected, I'm not finding you useful sources with this search. Tell me a bit more about the project topic."

"Well, she's doing something on organic versus inorganic fertilizer."

AHA! Now I know that the actual science project is (of course) a comparison of different methods of growing daikon. It doesn't matter if we find anything at all on daikon.

*grrr!*

This is one of the points I wish teachers would explain to their students:

A science project is a matter of comparing different processes, methods, variables. The supporting literature you need has to do with what is already known about those variables, not about your particular combination of variables.

"Okay, let me try a subject search on 'organic fertilizers'."

Below are the results of a Browse Search based on your topic: "organic fertilizer"

ORGANIC FERTILIZERS 1 title
See related headings for: ORGANIC FERTILIZERS
COMPOST
MANURES
NIGHT SOIL

*Rats!*

"Okay, Ma'am. Maybe you can use full text articles from our online science databases. I'll tell you how you can get to those through our website. But first, I'm going to try 'organic gardening'."

Ah! That gets several dozen hits. I tell her.

"Do they have those at my local branch?"

"Let me see [limiting search by SU organic gardening and branch name]. Yes, they have at least 13 titles there."

"Can I use the databases there?"

"Yes, ma'am. I'd recommend you go in and ask a librarian to help you find materials on 'organic gardening'."

"Okay. Thank you very much."

I mutter to myself: "They should have had a course on 'science project questions' in library school!"

Of course, the real point here is that science project questions are among the greatest challenges with regard to doing a really effective...here comes that horrible phrase...reference interview.

When I listen to all the whining in the media about "the end of librarianship," I know that it's ridiculous. To me, the primary characteristic of trained librarians is that we are Professional Searchers.

And the key to being a professional searcher is being able to help the customer figure out what she actually wants.

So...I should stop complaining already. When someone comes to me with a science project question, I should welcome it as the best sort of challenge for me as a professional. Right?

Naaaaaaaaa....

Mike

Can I go home now (Case #2)

This week we have a guest case, from Brian Herzog of Swiss Army Librarian.

Brian's entry:

Patron: I’ve never used a computer before, so can you help me find a job on craigslist?

Sigh. For non-reference librarians, here’s why this simple request is especially hard:

• Almost any kind of job-related request can be difficult
  
• Most of the job resources available in the library are online, so having no computer experience is automatically a setback


• Craigslist? It is certainly a valid job search tool, but there are other places I’d be more comfortable starting off a computer novice (she never did tell me how she got referred to craigslist)

Sigh! is right.

Brian follows with a good explanation of why this is not the "teaching moment" some might think it is. But he also advocates for public libraries to find some solutions to the challenge.

Thanks, Brian.

Mike

Can I go home now? (Case #1)

Okay. I can't resist.

Our Call Center patched a customer through to me at Reference this afternoon. Here's the gist of the exchange:

Customer: "I need to find eternal security on the Internet."

Me: "Um...."

[Glancing at Caller ID, I see that it's "_____ Shoes." My colleagues will know who I mean.]

M: "Uh, what is that in this case? A book title? A website?"

C: "It's a belief."

M: "Oh. Um...let me put the phone down while I do a search." [Googling....] "There are a couple of sites here...."

C: "Do they have an 800 number?"

I'll spare you the gory details.

Mike

Customer service for curmudgeons

The subtitle for this blog is not a joke. Not that I necessarily believe in reincarnation or karmic debt, but the metaphor is useful.

I'm one of those introverted people whose temperament is most suited to solitary intellectual and creative pursuits, or to interesting conversation and recreation with a few close friends.

My fantasy job would be to sit in my favorite Tenbucks coffeehouse with my laptop (if I actually had one) running the Ask a Librarian operator's software in background, so that I could do what I really want to do: read books and write all day.

Irony of ironies, for the whole thirtysome years of my professional life I have been in public service jobs. Worse, the last twentysome have been in the helping professions—first clinical counseling and now reference librarianship.

"But you asked for the job!" the smart-alecky reader might say.

Yes, well...I'm a Preacher's Kid, son of another shy, introverted, bookish man who really cared about people in the abstract—but didn't want them to get too close.

Dad was my hero when I was young, and the helper's skills are in the genes, even though they are paradoxically mixed with the "leave me alone" genes.

Anyway....

I'm sure that a number of you will recognize the perennial dilemma of the public service librarian. You're at the Ask Here desk, multitasking in email, WorkFlows, a Word or Excel file and maybe some other stuff, and someone comes up to the desk.

"Doggone it," you think. "If it weren't for these customers, I could get my work done!"


Or, for the nth time, someone asks you to help them get into their email because they've forgotten the password—or to create an email account or a resume, because they don't know how to use a computer.

Or for the nth-squared time, someone asks another dumb question, revealing that they suffer from Star Trek Syndrome:

A cognitive disorder of people who grew up watching Star Trek and believe that computers actually work like that now, that you can ask an ill-formed question in street dialect, when you're not really sure what you want, and the computer will figure out what you actually need and tell you in simple English.

Ah, you know the symptoms....

So why do I do this? And...I'm not meaning to brag here...how come I do it so well?

The "why" is easy: no one will pay me enough to sit in Tenbucks all day writing unpublishable fantasy novels.

The "how come" is way more difficult.

It's partly the curmudgeon's determination to do professional things, especially public things, well enough that he can't be blamed for...whatever.

But it's also that same PK curs... uh... inheritance: I really do care about people—even though it takes a lot of energy to pay genuine attention to them, even though that means letting them get closer to me than I really want them to.

So...a lot of routine transactions I'll acknowledge I do somewhat on autopilot. My level of customer service competence and my understanding of the resources we provides mean that I can "play back" appropriate scripts, coaching customers through whichever process they need help with.

Fortunately, though, they sometimes manage to get through to me as actual people. It might be when they present their questions. It might be later, when my resentment of their "interrupting" me shifts into professional eagerness to search out the solution...

...which sometimes shifts into a genuine exchange of satisfaction with a real human being, when we both realized that we have tracked down—or at least stumbled across—the best answer to the query.

Even though it makes for good jokes in the workroom or on a blog, I'm not too proud of my curmudgeonly resentment of customers.

I am grateful, though, that they insist upon becoming human beings, so that I have to become human, too.

I guess that's another reason I'm in this line of work.

It ain't easy, being human.