Reference Blog #2

I worked at the reference desk again on Saturday, October 17th. This time I worked with the always lovely Mindy Van Houten. I know we're only supposed to be blogging about 5 hours working a reference desk, but why do 5 hours when they could use me for 5 shifts? Amiright? :)

It was a lot slower than last time, which was a double edged sword. Mindy and I knew ahead of time we would likely be slow because Ohio State had a football game that afternoon. (For those of you who aren't familiar with OSU, football is big here.) While this left me with more time to interact with patrons and really focus on helping them in every way possible, it didn't exactly give me a lot of new ways to interact with them either.

One of the questions from the interview that I want to return to that I think was incredibly important when it happened was what a rookie librarian should know when they're at the desk alone. This has happened to me a few times and up until this point, I sort of felt like a deer in the headlights. But this particular time I realized I had become a lot more familiar with some of the tools at my disposal and procedures to help them.

For example, I've become incredibly familiar with accessing both print and online versions of consumer reports for practically any item you'd find in or near a household. I've come to realize this is probably a staple of working in a public library. Members of this community are using a lot of our public resources, which is fantastic! Tamara Murray, one of our magnificent IT specialists created a large number of guides to our online resources, and I've found myself handing those out a lot. They give patrons a step by step guide to accessing and logging onto the website and conducting a search, including a screen shot in every guide (there are roughly 20 currently, but we hope to have a guide for all of our online resources in the future).

That said, the best thing about being slow was having time to spend with patrons teaching them how to search as opposed to doing something faster for them by doing it myself. It may take a few more minutes, but with the majority of patrons you can save the patron and yourself a lot of time in the future by providing them with the knowledge to conduct their own searches in the future. I've especially been trying to introduce patrons to the easy process of using OhioLink and SearchOhio, which allows them to order items from other libraries if we don't have them. A surprising number of our patrons don't realize it exists, even though the icons appear on the screen whenever they conduct a search.

Teaching a patron how to conduct a productive search is a much better feeling than doing it for them.