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Reviving the Reference Interview: From Desk to Chat to Phone

Article  in  The Reference Librarian · April 2010

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David Harmeyer
Azusa Pacific University
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Reference Interviews: A Series of Personal Reference Stories

[This column is a collection of reference interview stories within a number of diverse

mediums (chat, phone, face-to-face, immersive environments) sharing one academic

librarian’s real dialogues with a host of patrons. Some names, places, and events have

been changed to preserve anonymity.]

Reviving the Reference Interview: From Desk to Chat to Phone

Perhaps one of the most dramatic shifts in the history of librarianship was the

morphing of the reference desk. It’s a jarring realization that this foundation of the

practice -- always prominent, staffed with informed, friendly librarians -- silently

dissolved into a fraction of itself in just a few short years. And I was present to see it

happen.

When I arrived at Brett College the Internet already had begun to take over. But

convention dies hard in the library world and a number of in-house initiatives took place

to save the reference desk. As the number of desk inquiries took a dive, we looked for

solutions to staff our outpost while the promises of online reference began to occupy

more of our time. At first we used well-trained and capable graduate student assistants

called Navigators. They were to field questions and refer the tougher ones to the on-call

librarian. The idea worked until we found out even our most well-trained were lured into

the world of good intentions, failing to pass questions on to the professional. And my on-

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call colleagues and I were less on-call than what was practical. Our busy schedules

added meetings that took us to places far from the reference desk and reasonable

response time.

The next attempt involved hiring, training, and supervising part-time employees

as adjunct library faculty. These individuals often held master’s or even doctorate

degrees outside the field of librarianship. Adjuncts served on the desk during librarian

meetings, late evenings, and weekends. Their added level of education brought to the

desk a wonderful sense of academic diversity. One scholar easily fielded requests for

English literature criticisms of Beowulf, Shakespeare, Lord Byron, or Jane Austen with

their background in comparative literature. Another, a Methodist pastor, became popular

with our seminary students, as she skillfully used the theological collections as well as

Greek and Hebrew syntax summaries and lexicons.

And yet, in less than a couple of years, our face-to-face reference statistics

diminished substantially. This meant placing less focus on professional staffing at the

physical desk and more on adapting towards newer technologies where, with some

level of audacity, patrons were daring to take their questions away from library

professionals, yet were expecting the same level of professional answers delivered from

the old reference desk.

So, today, it was late morning at my windowless office and I was serving up

myself a second cup of black coffee anticipating it would inspire me to finish up a few

library personnel reports before lunch. Then my phone rang.

“Good morning. This is Dave speaking.”

A nervous, rather loud female voice asked, “Where are you?”

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 The intensity of the caller’s response threw me off. Before I knew it I barked back

a knee-jerk response, “I beg your pardon?”

She continued in a more searching tone, “Ah, I mean, do you work at Brett

College or are you at some library call center? Are you a real librarian?”

A real librarian! My mind began to shuffle through a number of thoughts: what

has happened to our library benefactors, our strong patron base of support, that

someone would greet me in such a way? In library school we studied how people’s

information-seeking behavior would change. As the Internet became more ubiquitous

and unlimited information was at everyone’s finger tips, folks would leave the librarian

out of the equation and seek information on their own without a mediator or facilitator,

coining the term disintermediation.i My professors had said nothing about the loss of

respect or the rudeness of patrons.

But wait a moment. What has happened to the reference desk in the early part of

the twenty-first century? Library science practitioners have sought out and found where

the old familiar reference interview has moved. It’s moved online. The desk is richly

augmented with web-based technology tools such as email, chat, and online co-

browsing. However, within these electronic global applications patrons are no longer

guaranteed to be served by librarians from their own library. And too often the quality of

those library experiences have disappointed, frustrated, or confused patrons. So just

maybe they have a right to ask: who is answering my question? Are you a librarian, a

student assistant, an adjunct non-librarian or someone I will never personally know at a

call-center in some far away overseas country?

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 I tried to regain some composure as I answered, “Well, ah, yes. I’m a librarian. I

have a terminal degree in librarianship and I’m sitting in my office at Brett College. And,

so, no I’m not at some remote reference center, if that’s what you mean.” I still wasn’t

sure what this was about.

She lowered her voice to continue, “Oh, sorry, my name is Darleen, and you

answered my question about the Journal of Human Behavior and the Social

Environment.”

I’d come to pride myself on being able not to go blank at the initial part of a

question interview. However, this time I did. My mind simply didn’t process the journal

title because I was mildly disturbed that her name didn’t register in my memory. So I

asked “I, I did?”

Was I losing my mind? Darleen, Darleen. . . unique enough, but I couldn’t recall

her name.

She finally revealed an important detail, “Well, you emailed me yesterday. I have

it on my screen. It was about the Journal of Human Behavior and the Social

Environment.”

Perhaps the coffee was starting to kick in. The journal title was, now, certainly

familiar, but not her name. Why? And then I connected the dots, “Oh yes, forgive me.

You must have clicked on our AskALibrarian Meebo on the library’s website when we

weren’t monitoring. And, yes, of course, I did answer you as I was getting ready to leave

yesterday. How may I help you?”

She continued to talk as I multitasked, clicking my laptop’s cursor through a link

on Brett College’s 24/7 reference service. In a few moments I had my previous

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response to her question on my screen. I now saw why her name never registered. She

had left the name field blank.

She concluded, “So you are at Brett. I just need someone to help me find an

article. I wasn’t sure if I needed to come to campus to get it.”

I could tell by my previous email response why she may be confused. I continued

to explain, “As you see in my original response, the journal you want is held at Brett in

both paper and electronic. But it looks like the electronic full text is one year delayed.

And you first chatted with a librarian that was not at Brett. But it looks like that person

gave you some relevant information. What exactly do you need?”

She answered, “Yes, you’re right. I thought I was chatting with a librarian at my

school, not someone in South Florida at a reference center or something.”

I answered, “Well, a group of us at Brett do monitor the 24/7 chat during the day

time, but not at….let’s see, it looks like you were chatting with a Frank around 12:40 in

the morning.”

“Yes, that’s about right. My real question is. . . my professor said I needed to

read one article from this journal. And I was on some web page a few days ago and

found a really good article on fathers and infants, but when I tried to get to the full text, it

asked me to pay $25. I don’t understand. I’m very frustrated. Do I need to come to

campus to get it?”

I reassured her, “Well, it sounds like you tried to access the journal through the

publisher’s Internet site, and when you finally got a relevant article, a third party vendor

was happy to provide it to you at a cost. You don’t need to do that as long as you’re a

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 student. We have it in full text without additional charges. Think of it as part of your

tuition. You already paid for it.”

“Wow! That’s a relief. OK, so how do I get it?”

Over the next couple of minutes and a few more draughts of coffee, I walked her

through how to get at the full text. “Darleen, what I’m going to do next is show you how

to find the database that holds your article by using our web-based journal finder and

then drilling down to the full text.” In just a few moments she was doing her own search

finding that article on fathers and infants within the limits of the single journal title.

Our language soon turned to good-byes and thanks all around. The now

pleasant-speaking student was grateful for the instruction and was even going to put in

a good word for the library with her class.

“Thanks for your call, Darleen. Let me know if you need further assistance.”

And with that I hung up the phone. I got up from my desk and walked out of my

office, through an outer area of other offices and into the library proper. In a few

moments I was in view of the old wooden reference desk. It was during lunch time, so it

was unoccupied. Sentimentally, I moved behind it and sat in its double armed swivel

chair. It squeaked slightly as I scooted it under the desktop. I sat there pondering the

previous conversation and wondered what future lay ahead for the old mainstay.

i
J. Stephen Downie, “Jumping off the Disintermediation Bandwagon: Reharmonizing LIS Education for the Realities
of the 21st Century,” http://people.lis.illinois.edu/~jdownie/alise99/ (accessed December 17, 2009).

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