Connecting Librarian

Happy New Year everyone. Here’s hoping that 2012 is better than 2011, regardless of whether it was good or bad.

I just finished reading a post by Andy Burkhardt at Information Tyrannosaur which got me pondering. I’m only new to Andy’s blog, but I highly recommend you check it out, if you haven’t already.  Entitled Creating Meaning for Library Users, it took some great ideas from a TED talk by Experience Designer Nathan Shedroff.

What caught my attention however, was his closing paragraph.

“We are not simply delivering access to e-books or databases. We are not only conducting reference interviews or doing information literacy. We are doing something much more important than that.”

He’s referring to all the things that libraries do for their users, that is meaningful to their users. The things that keep them coming back for more, that leave them satisfied each time they leave our buildings.

It’s not new. We all know the future of libraries is not just tied up in our collections or our roles as information intermediaries.

But what are those things we do, that address the ‘meaning’ that our users are seeking. And what are the things we want to do that we aren’t doing yet and why aren’t we?

At my library, we have had an amazing increase in the number of people wanting to use the space for study this year. Not necessarily the collection, but definitely the wi-fi, the tables and in a lot of instances, some quiet. Unfortunately, we are not too well set up for the latter, with every inch of floorspace being used and being a public library, more often than not, its far from quiet. Plans are being made to fix this, but it all takes time and money. In the meantime, we do what we can. So one of the things we would like to do, is to be able to provide that ‘quiet’ study space, whilst not becoming the ‘shhh’ police that we all abhor (and don’t have the time for).

I want our users to know and remember the services we have that suit their needs, so that they can access them when they need or want them. Unfortunately, we can only tell them about those services when they join and when they ask, otherwise we can’t make them remember. Its very frustrating too, I can tell you.

I want more people from our community to come in and discover the treasures that we offer, in facilities, programs, collections and more. Our communities are great supporters of libraries, but nowhere near enough of them are members.  Our marketing programs are great, but somehow people still don’t actually make it into our buildings or onto our websites, to learn more and make use of the great things we have on offer. If only there was a way to make a library card the latest hip trend, one that never goes out of fashion……

What do you want for your users? What can you do to make it happen? I don’t know what I can do to make my wishes reality, but I am going to work on finding out.

Happy New Year!

Very interesting word discretion. It gives me the image of someone tapping the side of their nose, saying nudge, nudge, wink, wink. But in the library world, its about giving the staff the opportunity to ‘bend’ the rules, where they deem there is a situation where they should be bent.

Rules are important. They aim to guarantee that the world doesn’t dissolve into chaos and that everyone has equal opportunity and treatment, that we are kept safe and our privacy protected and much more. But if rules are always followed without discretion, they we have gone too far the other way.

Unfortunately, some staff mistakenly believe its  just about bending the rules. Its also about the situation and the people involved.

It may be appropriate to do so where a recipient is deemed worthy, or a situation where not to do so would be detrimental. Sometimes its just good PR.

And there are some rules which are easier to bend than others.

But all this requires, not only good judgement on whether the rules should be bent, but also on whether they should be bent in that particular situation and for that particular person.

Too often, a rule has been bent for a library user and despite being told that it was a one off and that they must abide by them next time, every single time they come in, they try to bend them again with the whole – “but they let me do it last time!”  Saying this is a virtual guarantee to never having any leeway on any situation in the library every again!

Making that sort of judgement call can be very difficult and is probably why staff will often refer to more senior staff to confirm it is the right option (or not) to take. (it also helps that they won’t get the flack if there is any problems resulting from the decision).

There are some rules I will bend more easily than others and some that I refuse to bend for anyone. Again it comes back to a judgement call on both the rule and the people involved in the situation. You want to help people, but you don’t want to make things difficult for other library staff if it all backfires.

The good news is that no-one is damaged irretrievably if using staff discretion leads to a difficult situation. And sometimes it doesn’t matter which way you go, you lose. But if nothing else, our managers will always support us if we stick to the rules, so if unsure, we are told to do that.

Have you had an instances where staff discretion backfired on you?  Are there rules you would bend more easily and others you wouldn’t bend at all?

We are moving towards roving reference at our library. This is a very new concept for us, as we have always been tied to a desk. However, with the introduction of RFID, we have the potential to move out from our desk.  The potential is not yet fully realised, so until it is, we will start taking baby steps in this journey.

So what will roving reference look like at our library?

At the moment, it looks like it usually does – we are away from the desk, doing some admin type work, like shelving holds (they are self-serve), find items to fulfill holds or emptying trolleys to the appropriate collection areas. And as we do, people grab us as we go by and ask questions. And whenever we go to do a shelf check or help a user find a particular area in the library, we are always waylaid with further queries.

So what will be different? Hopefully, we will be able to spend more time with these people when they ask questions and not feel the need to complete it and get back to the crush that is our typical desk traffic, as soon as humanly possible. We will be more observant about library users around us and actively seek to help them where they are at – daunting as the prospect might seem.

And we will get our staff trained up a bit more so that its not just the librarians doing this. We will develop scenarios to give confidence to those who don’t like to stray from the desk and we will buddy up with these newly trained staff, to help them ‘get their feet wet’.

But we will do so only where it is not to the detriment of those we serve at our desk. They will remain our first priority, but our customer service will expand to those who don’t approach the desk. Customer service is one of strengths and we plan to capitalise on this opportunity and improve it – whether its deliberately seeking out those to help, or its incidental on our way to doing other things.

What does roving reference look like in your library?

There’s been a lot of talk about the future of libraries, but it is mostly coming from librarians and naysayers predicting the end of the book. I am looking forward to the results of research our library is conducting on the topic, which will include input from our library users.

But in the meantime, they are already having their say about what they want. With their hands and feet and voices.  Pretty much as they have always done, lol.

They are saying with their loans, that CDs are maybe now just starting to go out of lending fashion – with our loans starting to go down in the Rock and Pop genres (but not in the other genres). What’s next is yet to be determined. Finding a workable library model for music is a challenge in itself.

They are saying it with their queries and feedback forms about scanning. We don’t. Yet. We are getting new photocopiers shortly which will scan to USB as well as copy though.

They are saying with their feet, that they need space to study and work.  We are a single floor building – so no quiet study areas. We have usually been busy with studying students at exam time, but this year, as never before, its been all term round, for quiet study and group work. Wandering through the collections at various times, you would think it was empty, but you get to the seating areas and there are people as far as the eye can see – double and tripled up and even sitting at kids tables and on the floor, when there are no other options.

We also know that there are mature aged learners and business owners who use the library for the space and free wifi even more than the students do. And that we have run out of tables and chairs too often to ignore. Fortunately, we are getting more of those as well and eventually a new building which should accommodate the growing demand for quiet study space. In the meantime, we have more furniture coming, just need to figure out where it will go!

So although its important for us to think about what libraries will be, do and have in future and we need to ask our users this question as well as our staff, its even more important that we are listening to what they are telling us about their needs now in other ways – through their hands, feet and mouths.

How do you ensure that everyone you serve gets equal service, as well as good service?

This comes to mind as I was dealing with a library user the other day, who was also a former neighbour. We got to catching up (as you do), but the catch-up went longer than the transaction that was being conducted. Normally not a problem, but I was very aware that there was  a queue of people waiting to be served and that there were no other staff available to do so.

I know as a customer, the frustration of waiting in line to be served and having to wait longer because the staff member and customer are having a chat. So I am always aware of this, when I am on the other side of the counter.

But I also know that for many library users, the contact with staff is just as important, if not more so, than the transaction being conducted.  So how do you find the balance?

I have known staff who will give exemplary customer service to a library user, but in doing so, many others have to wait longer at their turn and ultimately have less customer service, as the demand far exceeds the supply. One person may walk away happy, but many others won’t.

Ideally we would love to be able to give this level of service to every library user, but it is far from being realistically possible.

Having to find this balance pretty much every hour of every day in the library, means that I have become quite expert at the wind up – making sure that the transaction is completed in a timely manner, but also to the satisfaction (as far as possible) to the user.

It has helped that now with RFID in place we sometimes have a staff member who can get out from behind the desk and to the queue, to see if there is any way they can be helped without having to wait at circulation. This has helped both our queue management and our customer service immensely, but is not always possible in peak times (which somehow seems like most of the time, lol).

Do you have any policies regarding this or any practices you have found particularly helpful in achieving this balance?

I worked today, a Saturday. All I can say is people are amazing. But they just seem to amaze me more on the weekend shifts than they do during the week.

Here’s just a few examples from today.

I came out of our staff area, to find a grandmother, sitting on a trestle table and hauling up her granddaughter to sit beside her. Being a trestle table, I could just see it in collapsing with the combined weight and the lack of supporting legs on the corner.  Needless to say, I asked them to get down (nicely of course). Aren’t grandmothers the ones who normally tell you to get off the table?

The other one was a lady who came in saying her card had a virus and it was stopping her from going on a computer. Her library card that is. The staff member checked her card, which had a fine. She paid the fine and was booked on to a computer, muttering that when she did and the virus came up on her card, that she would be back to “show us”. She didn’t come back.

Then there was the young fella who needed scrap paper and thought the best place to get that was from the photocopier tray and gave a blank look when it was pointed out to him that it was stealing. (you pay for the paper too, not just the copy – to be fair, he came back and apologised) And the gentleman who wandered behind our desk, to check out when his son could get onto the games consoles, because he couldn’t wait a half second for a staff member to finish serving another library user. And the library user who swore we were using old brochures of library hours, that were different to the ones in other branches – turned out he got them mixed up with the Family History Group hours.

But it was all OK. They were all treated with respect and politeness. They weren’t difficult or nasty, just quirky, so we can live with that and it gives us a smile and something to shake our heads over when we have a spare moment.

I love public libraries – we serve everyone equally, regardless of demographics, or level of quirkiness.

What sort of quirky behaviour have you comes across in your library recently?

And no I checked, the full moon isn’t until Wednesday.

I am pleased to say that at our library, we most often discover to our delight, that we have exceeded our users expectations. We have more, offer more, help more etc, than they expect – give good quality content and good customer service.

But I also have to admit, that we also get people who expect the earth.  They expect us to have the fastest internet connections on the earth and to know that they need this title NOW and have it waiting for them right this moment. They expect us to wait while they finish this urgent email/photocopy/research, even though the library closed 10 minutes ago and they have known this needed to be done for weeks.

We all know this story, it happens in our libraries in different ways all the time, with only the names and the places changed.

My response to the former is to preen a little – I love being able to surprise people with better than they expected.  I enjoy giving good customer service that catches people by surprise. And my response to the latter is usually, “what do they expect from a free service?”

That’s not to say that we don’t give it our all – we do. Our collections are keyed to our community, our internet is the best we can get and afford and more.  We have to match the community need with the privacy and other issues, so there is always a balancing act.

So I admit, I tend to write off the naysayers, acknowledging that at times we aren’t even going to be able to meet people’s expectations, let alone exceed them. But on thinking about this post, I realised that I could be missing an opportunity. One to investigate the unsatisfied expectation and see if there is a way, in amongst all our constraints, that we could improve in that area, so that the next person is satisfied, or even better, walks away happily impressed.

Continuous improvement, with our users pointing the way. That’s not to say we are going to be able to satisfy every expectation (no, you can’t get compensation because something happened that you didn’t like, but you agreed to when you accepted the conditions of use). But we might be able to discover something useful out of their complaints/observations and make things better for everyone, including staff. If that’s what can come out of it, I think its worth a bit more consideration than “what do they expect from a free service.” So that’s what I’ll try to give it.

This morning I got a call from my mum, saying she had seen on the news that there had been a fire at my kids’ school. A bit of quick research on my part and we discovered that overnight, a fire had severely damaged the new gym. The gym has taken 18 months to build, was 6 months late and handover was going to be Monday. The gym was a joint use facility, with the school using it during the day and local Council using it for basketball comps and other events after hours.

We are all a bit distressed about it. From what I could see of the building this morning, at least half of the building has fire and/or water damage from floor to ceiling. The one thing that I quickly picked up, from both conversations around the school and then from talking with people at the shopping centre next door, was a sense of community ownership. This event hasn’t happened to an objective building, it has happened to a community. People who have no vested interest in the school, but who just live or work locally, are just as outraged as those of us who do. Its gratifying to experience that sort of camaraderie.

Which got me thinking about this in relation to the things I have blogged about in recent days, as part of Blog Every Day of June.

Do our communities have that same sense of ownership of our libraries?

Do our communities actually see the library as their own, or do they see it as being owned by the library service and the library staff that work there? I am sure that there are many users who do see it as their library, but how many?

I think of it in relation to all the library closures overseas in the US and the UK. Do our communities feel the ownership enough to fight for us, if we were threatened with the same closures? I know they have fought and won in the fight to build new libraries, would they fight to save the old ones.

I’d like to think they would. But we have to make sure that we continue to give them something worth fighting for. Do what we do well, connections, in whatever form that takes.

Hi, Day 2, hope you have survived Day 1 of Blog Every Day of June. If you’re interested, you’ll be able to check out a daily summary of what’s been talked about on various participants blogs at Libraries Interact.

I was inspired for this post by a video compiled by Kathryn Greenhill of Librarians Matter. She interviewed librarians attending the ALIA Online conference in Sydney this past January, asking them What is a library and what does a librarian do.  Check it out….

It was as I was watching that a couple of the interviewees mentioned connections.  And that thought linked in to a lot that I have been considering. I have been reading everywhere about the future of libraries, with books about to disappear (lol) and everything being on the internet (lol and yawn – heard it before).

The future of public libraries has been of interest to my workplace too, as we work with our Councils to plan and build some more new libraries in the next few years. If libraries are going to be obsolete, then why do we need the buildings?

I think that our librarian interviewees have got it very right. Libraries and librarians have always been about connections. Libraries until recently at least, have mostly been about connecting the library user to the right book or the right information. (not ignoring the DVDs, CD’s, magazines, digital resources or many other things that libraries do). But if and when the book finally becomes less of a feature of libraries – due to online availability and wider accessibility, what will libraries and librarians be about then. We will still be about connections.

Whether its connecting users to facilities – whether its study space, online connections, equipment, meeting facilities, or connecting users to resources – whether its online or physical, in whatever form it may take, or even connecting users to other users – for learning, for sharing common interests, for a common goal or more. Librarians are connected to their libraries, to their users and to their communities, so are ideally placed to help others make whatever connections they need or want.

I don’t know what the library of the future is going to be like, but I do know that it will be about the connections that our communities need and want and that librarians will still be needed to make them happen.

Yesterday, Tuesday 1st March 2011, was International Hug a Librarian Day. It was well spread across the Internet, with many a mention on Twitter, many blog posts and even a Facebook event.

Responses to the whole concept of International Hug a Librarian Day ranged from “don’t touch me” to full on embracing (lol) of the idea.

Hug by jiunn kang too, uploaded to Flickr 2.1.2010, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The only people who knew about it at my library, were the ones I told.  We didn’t advertise it, because I didn’t want to see people getting injured trying to lean across our desks to hug a librarian, or have library staff running away trying to avoid a hug, lol.

The most common response I noted, both in person and online (at least from the Australians in general), was don’t touch me, but virtual hugs were welcome.

So the whole idea raises a couple of questions for me.

1. How did we get an International Day for this?

2. Why does someone think librarians in particular, need a special day for a hug?

1.  It is not an official United Nations event, not recognised on Wikipedia as a day belonging to any international agency and even Jane Curtis at the ABC who hugged three librarians, couldn’t find its source. But it truly was an international event, with librarians chiming in from all around the world on their thoughts and experiences.

There was even a Facebook event, International Hug a Librarian Day, created by Dinoslav Maganjicky.  So far, I have not been able to find out anymore than that. (the power of something going viral on the web!)

2. According to the Facebook event, the day was on  “Because librarians are cool and they help and love everyone!” Which we are and we do, but do we really need to get hugs, from mostly complete strangers?  I know a LOT of people who are very uncomfortable with that idea.

Librarians are people too and we need hugs like everyone else, but I would think that also like most people, we are choosy about who we accept them from. I am sure we have all had our share of experiences of having our personal space invaded by someone unwelcome!

Although I am unsure as to whether I like the idea or not, I can appreciate the desire to thank our wonderful librarians for all they do. We go above and beyond the call of duty, are not the best paid profession around, are very community minded and service-oriented, and are generally really nice and huggable people.

Although it was mostly only distributed by librarians to librarians, it was nice to see that some libraries advertised it to their users and that even places like the ABC picked it up.

I didn’t get a hug for being a librarian yesterday. I got something better that had nothing to do with the day. When I came home for my dinner, in the middle of my late shift, my family presented me with flowers, chocolate raspberries and a lovely hand drawn card.  It was a thankyou  for working so hard for them, with their dad’s new food restrictions, cooking two meals a night, doing so whilst unwell and still caring and working hard for them. (summarised from the card) Needless to say, I cried.

But enough about me, what about you? Did you do anything in your library to celebrate International Hug a Librarian Day? If so, what and if not, why not? Would love to hear of your experiences and whether you think its a good thing or not and how to cope with the overwhelming need for others to touch you, if it continues to grow and become more popular.