DIY Librarian

I was walking into my building yesterday morning at about 20 minutes til 8 when a student approached me: “Is it too early to ask you a question?”

She had a follow-up question about a resource I had helped her with the previous week. I was able to answer her question, and headed up to my office knowing that I had already helped someone. It’s these little moments that make it all worthwhile for me.

The Richmond Marathon starts right in front of the Library of Virginia. Yes, take me anywhere, and I will find a library!

The Los Angeles Marathon finishes in front of the LA Public Library, or at least it did the year I was there and trying to visit the library.

I went back to my old school last week, and of course I went to the library. This is where I decided to become a librarian.

I found one of the librarians who was there when I was a student, and we chatted about the state of the profession, ALA, other Bard students who went on to become librarians, and the exciting things they’re doing with their archives.

The library looked great—full of students, even on a beautiful Friday afternoon. My old dorm was another story.

Check out this video about The High Strung’s 50-library tour on Ypulse. See little kids dancing like maniacs! See them reading during a rock concert! Libraries rock! [via LISNews]

Last week I went to a blues concert at my local public library. It was in a beautiful community room in the new library building, and it was standing room only.

On ACRLog, Marc Meola points to a discussion of tags vs. subject headings at Thing-ology, Library Thing’s blog. The discussion is interesting, and not just because it seems to come to the same conclusion that I did (that both tags and subject headings are useful and interesting, and that an ideal system can make use of both). I find it interesting because it involves, as far as I can tell, both librarians and non-librarians. After all, we certainly don’t have a monopoly on classification (think of biology!) or on a love for books (first lesson in library school: when you go to an interview, the answer to “why do you want to work in a library?” is not “because I love books!”). We are trained specialists in the organization, preservation, and retrieval of information including books, and we can certainly learn from others with similar interests, including our patrons.

Following up on yesterday’s post about what to call library patrons: calling them customers might signal not only a shift in perceptions, but a downgrading of the actual service delivered. In “Minding the Retail Reference Gap” (Library Journal, May 15, 2006), Kaetrena Davis points out that libraries, unlike retail establishments, are interested not in profits but in helping people. The quick answer, or the answer that satisfies the patron, she says, might not be the best answer or the one that will benefit the patron the most in the long run.

I hesitate to make another comparison to the medical profession, but I read a lot of health care news at work, so I am citing what is familiar to me outside of library science. In “Role of patient satisfaction” (Physician’s News Digest, December 2003), Christopher Guadagnino presents opposing viewpoints on patient satisfaction surveys. Some view health care as a service industry and place high value on patient satisfaction measures for everything from staff training to HMO reimbursements. Others argue that patient satisfaction cannot be used as an overall measure of care quality because patients do not fully understand clinical procedures.

To make a comparison to another service-oriented profession, do course evaluations present a true measure of teaching effectiveness?

For libraries, I think customer satisfaction is important, but it should not be the only goal of library service. Of course we want our patrons to be satisfied with our services—but we want them to be truly satisfied, armed with information and connections that will help them, not just believing that they are satisfied. Calling them customers places too much importance on simplistic measures of satisfaction and not enough on whether libraries are truly providing quality services.

I recently joined a CSA program. Basically, I am a customer of the farm. I pay a subscription fee, and in return I get fresh produce every week. But I’ve noticed that the farmers call me a member, not a customer. The word choice changes my expectations about my experience at the farm, and helps me appreciate why joining a CSA is so different from shopping for vegetables at the supermarket—just as asking a question at a library reference desk is so different from buying a book at a bookstore. Calling me a member encourages me to volunteer at the farm, too. Customers do not generally volunteer, but patrons do, so libraries that rely on community support or volunteer labor should be especially reluctant to go too far down the retail path.

Steven Bell wonders what we should call the people who use our libraries. “User” is degrading, says Don Norman in his essay “Words Matter”. “People”, as Bell points out, just sounds odd in a lot of contexts (although my library’s user database is called people!). It is also not specific enough; we design libraries and services for people who visit the library or use our services, or those who might potentially do so, but not for people in general.

As customer service becomes more and more important in non-retail settings, I have a feeling we are not the only profession struggling with what to call the people we serve. I did a quick PubMed search and came across an abstract for Patient, consumer, client, or customer: what do people want to be called? (Health Expectations, December 2005). The conclusion? “Care recipients” felt that alternatives like customer, client, and consumer imply a market relationship that they find objectionable. They prefer to be called patients.

I wonder if libraries should consider a return to patrons. Despite our desire to be like Amazon, or Barnes & Noble, or some other commercial enterprise (certainly a worthy desire if it improves the library), libraries are not commercial enterprises, and I don’t think most people expect to be treated the same way at Barnes & Noble as they do at a library.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that more students named the library as an important factor in enrollment than named dorms, according to a survey. The difference isn’t huge—about half compared to 42.2%—but I think it’s significant that students still value the library as much as techology and classrooms when making their college decisions. The article, Facilities Can Play Key Role in Students’ Enrollment Decisions, Study Finds, is online but requires a subscription for access.

Update (6/5/2006): The Chronicle article requires a subscription for access, but you can read a summary of the research project in the March/April issue of Facilities Manager. [via ACRLog]

If you followed the link to the APLIC-I conference program in the previous post, you may have seen a presentation authored by yours truly and two colleagues about my library’s blogging project, News from the PRI Library and Data Archive.

The blog may seem overwhelming at first—we have a lot of categories and a lot of posts—but we are primarily encouraging our users to subscribe to the particular categories that interest them and using the feeds to provide content for other web pages. For instance, we’ve included the feed for the library categories on my library’s home page.

We think the majority of our users are not currently using feed readers, so we’re introducing this gradually. We do already have a few people subscribed to our feeds, though, and all four of our staff members are posting regularly to the blog

Via the Creative Commons blog, free symbols for use in “airports and other transportation hubs and at large international events”, from a collaboration between AIGA and the US Department of Transportation. Some of these could probably be used in library signage, but wouldn’t it be cool to have a collection like this for libraries? (If such a thing exists, please let me know!)