[This year's December Days are categorized! Specifically: "Things I should have learned in library school, had (I/they) been paying attention. But I can make that out of just about anything you'd like to know about library school or the library profession, so if you have suggestions, I'll happily take them.]
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redsixwing wanted to know what thing I use all the time in the library profession. Which, essentially, would be one of those things I did learn in library school, because I was paying attention. But much like the thing I never use, there is a very specific set of skills that I had to pick up on the job, even though the foundation of those skills is something that's at the bedrock of every reference interaction and something that they won't let you out of library school until you've learned how to do it.
In library school, there is a course you will take on how to give The Reference Interview. Or at least a section of one of your courses that will cover this essential topic. Because it is a truth of the library world that the first question or statement a person gives when interacting with you is incomplete. The question itself may be grammatically correct, a complete sentence, and otherwise coherent in syntax. But it often lacks the information needed to fully understand and help a person. "Where are your childrens' books [because I'm trying to find The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe]?" "I need a guest pass [so I can check all the job boards and see if there's been anything new, as well as deal with the unemployment insurance bureaucracy]." "Can you help me find a book [that I need for my class and don't want to have to spend an exorbitant amount of money on]?"
And so forth. It's not that people are deliberately trying to hide things from us. Except on sensitive subjects - people get hung up on asking us where they can find books about sex, relationships, self-harm and the like, because it's really hard to ask someone else about those things, because that means someone will know about them, and as much as librarians would like to be the kind of people you can trust for those conversations, it requires a lot of rapport or witnessing a librarian prove themselves to be an ally before those subjects will come up. Mostly, though, people don't tell us everything up front because they don't realize that's what we need to be effective. Thus, The Reference Interview, which is essentially a method of asking open-ended questions to a person so that they will give us more information. In my class, we demonstrated the effectiveness of the open-ended question by first playing Twenty Questions with a standard reference query. You don't get much out of someone if the only answers you get from them are "Yes" and "No". But with the open-ended question, you can get to the result in two questions.
As with all things, of course, we get the idealized version in school and then have to learn how to translate that out to the real world. Some people, of course, are clearly intent on their thing, whether that's computer access or getting to a spot in the library, and are uninterested in any further conversation than what's necessary. Others, however, seem to respond well to a particular question I've learned to ask: "Is there something specific you are looking for?" Because a lot of people that ask you where your section on X, Y, or Zed is do have a more specific thing in mind when they ask, but they often figure they can find it themselves if they get into the general space. Assuming they have the right general space, that is. The Dewey Decimal Classification is full of oddities and prejudices that make it harder to use than classifications that might give more equal weighting to religious subjects or that might file works of poetry under their languages rather than as a separate section all to themselves. Still, asking for specifics is definitely one of the ways you can get someone to engage with you on the subject.
Getting people to tell you what they want is sometimes an exercise in free association games. "I want a good mystery." "Okay, tell me about some of the mystery authors you like reading." "Well, I like author Alice." "What do you like about Alice?" "She writes Ex, Why, and Bet." "Have you read author Bethany? She does Why and Bet." "Don't like her." "What don't you like?" And so on, until we often go to the stacks to find an author that seems to work and is checked in, which usually triggers remembering a few other authors and asking about them, until the requester has a few books to try that are new and see if they like them. Wandering the materials is often one of the things that triggers place memory for both librarian and user, and it's always good to go check the shelves to see if you're perfect recommendation is actually available - our catalog system doesn't know any better when things have been disappeared from the shelves one way or another, or when they're in the wrong place by accident or mischief.
Algorithms cam do some of this work, at least in the idea of recommending more to you based on what you already like and have read before, and some in the matter of tag and keyword matching, if the tagging and categorization system is sufficiently robust and deep to make matches and linkages. But sometimes it takes a human touch to get someone acquainted with material they wouldn't otherwise be interested in at all. Because sometimes you get a person who comes in very interested in sports stories, only wants sports stories, and then ends up leaving with a story all about zombies invading an idyllic town, because the main characters go to town on the undead using their baseball bats. Or a story all about an intergalactic cooking competition, because of the sport-like atmosphere of the event. And sometimes you get successful by hitting the almost-random button, where after listening to the things that are liked and the reasons why your suggestions keep getting rejected, you tempt the reader with something that has a promising cover blurb, good art on the cover, and the guarantee that they don't have to lay out any money for it or read past the first few pages to decide whether or not to stick with it. Sometimes it's a complete bomb, but more often than not, there's enough of a spark to follow it through to completion.
Recommendations and reference questions are as much an art form as a formula or method to follow. Establishing a shared terminology, getting to the actual question, and then finding promising leads are matters of finesse, social engineering, mapping a search engine query to the human knowledge collected, and then interpreting the results back to the person to see whether you're on the right track. It's a very individual act, and while I learned the broad sweep of how to do it in school, the more I learn my community and the people that live in it, the more I know how to make my interviews effective. Which comes with the extra bonus of being able to stay articulating needs and gathering information from people who aren't coming to the library, but should be.
redsixwing wanted to know what thing I use all the time in the library profession. Which, essentially, would be one of those things I did learn in library school, because I was paying attention. But much like the thing I never use, there is a very specific set of skills that I had to pick up on the job, even though the foundation of those skills is something that's at the bedrock of every reference interaction and something that they won't let you out of library school until you've learned how to do it.In library school, there is a course you will take on how to give The Reference Interview. Or at least a section of one of your courses that will cover this essential topic. Because it is a truth of the library world that the first question or statement a person gives when interacting with you is incomplete. The question itself may be grammatically correct, a complete sentence, and otherwise coherent in syntax. But it often lacks the information needed to fully understand and help a person. "Where are your childrens' books [because I'm trying to find The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe]?" "I need a guest pass [so I can check all the job boards and see if there's been anything new, as well as deal with the unemployment insurance bureaucracy]." "Can you help me find a book [that I need for my class and don't want to have to spend an exorbitant amount of money on]?"
And so forth. It's not that people are deliberately trying to hide things from us. Except on sensitive subjects - people get hung up on asking us where they can find books about sex, relationships, self-harm and the like, because it's really hard to ask someone else about those things, because that means someone will know about them, and as much as librarians would like to be the kind of people you can trust for those conversations, it requires a lot of rapport or witnessing a librarian prove themselves to be an ally before those subjects will come up. Mostly, though, people don't tell us everything up front because they don't realize that's what we need to be effective. Thus, The Reference Interview, which is essentially a method of asking open-ended questions to a person so that they will give us more information. In my class, we demonstrated the effectiveness of the open-ended question by first playing Twenty Questions with a standard reference query. You don't get much out of someone if the only answers you get from them are "Yes" and "No". But with the open-ended question, you can get to the result in two questions.
As with all things, of course, we get the idealized version in school and then have to learn how to translate that out to the real world. Some people, of course, are clearly intent on their thing, whether that's computer access or getting to a spot in the library, and are uninterested in any further conversation than what's necessary. Others, however, seem to respond well to a particular question I've learned to ask: "Is there something specific you are looking for?" Because a lot of people that ask you where your section on X, Y, or Zed is do have a more specific thing in mind when they ask, but they often figure they can find it themselves if they get into the general space. Assuming they have the right general space, that is. The Dewey Decimal Classification is full of oddities and prejudices that make it harder to use than classifications that might give more equal weighting to religious subjects or that might file works of poetry under their languages rather than as a separate section all to themselves. Still, asking for specifics is definitely one of the ways you can get someone to engage with you on the subject.
Getting people to tell you what they want is sometimes an exercise in free association games. "I want a good mystery." "Okay, tell me about some of the mystery authors you like reading." "Well, I like author Alice." "What do you like about Alice?" "She writes Ex, Why, and Bet." "Have you read author Bethany? She does Why and Bet." "Don't like her." "What don't you like?" And so on, until we often go to the stacks to find an author that seems to work and is checked in, which usually triggers remembering a few other authors and asking about them, until the requester has a few books to try that are new and see if they like them. Wandering the materials is often one of the things that triggers place memory for both librarian and user, and it's always good to go check the shelves to see if you're perfect recommendation is actually available - our catalog system doesn't know any better when things have been disappeared from the shelves one way or another, or when they're in the wrong place by accident or mischief.
Algorithms cam do some of this work, at least in the idea of recommending more to you based on what you already like and have read before, and some in the matter of tag and keyword matching, if the tagging and categorization system is sufficiently robust and deep to make matches and linkages. But sometimes it takes a human touch to get someone acquainted with material they wouldn't otherwise be interested in at all. Because sometimes you get a person who comes in very interested in sports stories, only wants sports stories, and then ends up leaving with a story all about zombies invading an idyllic town, because the main characters go to town on the undead using their baseball bats. Or a story all about an intergalactic cooking competition, because of the sport-like atmosphere of the event. And sometimes you get successful by hitting the almost-random button, where after listening to the things that are liked and the reasons why your suggestions keep getting rejected, you tempt the reader with something that has a promising cover blurb, good art on the cover, and the guarantee that they don't have to lay out any money for it or read past the first few pages to decide whether or not to stick with it. Sometimes it's a complete bomb, but more often than not, there's enough of a spark to follow it through to completion.
Recommendations and reference questions are as much an art form as a formula or method to follow. Establishing a shared terminology, getting to the actual question, and then finding promising leads are matters of finesse, social engineering, mapping a search engine query to the human knowledge collected, and then interpreting the results back to the person to see whether you're on the right track. It's a very individual act, and while I learned the broad sweep of how to do it in school, the more I learn my community and the people that live in it, the more I know how to make my interviews effective. Which comes with the extra bonus of being able to stay articulating needs and gathering information from people who aren't coming to the library, but should be.
