Earning the trust of our users

If the comments on the first post of a newly launched blog, Virtual Reference, are any indication of future success, then I think this new site will be winner. Sponsored by the Virtual Reference Committee of RUSA's Machine Assisted Reference Section.

Commenters on the initial post on the blog, "Abuse is in the Eye of the Beholder: Managing Challenging Users in Chat Virtual Reference," first raised the question about what might constitute an "innapproriate" or "unsuitable" message from a patron in a chat reference service. Personal questions from patrons (such as "Are you single?" or "Where do you live?") were considered by some to be irrelevant to the job of connecting users to information and of being regarded as a trustworthy source of help. But a series of excellent comments raised an argument for why we need to also be aware of the need to earning the trust of our users. Caleb Tucker-Raymond and Luke Rosenberger's comments and their posts on their own blogs make a good case for why a successful reference interaction might involve more than just delivering "answers" to users (see this post by Luke and this one by Caleb).

In library school at the Pratt Institute, I was fortunate enough to take my required reference course with Marie Radford, who worked hard to teach her students about the value of interpersonal communication in reference transactions. From this course, I took away a sense of how important relational skills are in successful reference work. As noted in Radford's book, The Reference Encounter: Interpersonal Communication in the Academic Library, patrons tend to value highly the relationship they form with the librarian, perhaps more so than librarians are aware.

In my own experience in chat reference, I have found that when I disclose personal information (e.g., "I know that book! I remember reading it in college.") or reply to questions from patrons, I generally get a good reaction from the user (much as I do at the reference desk). Working in a college library, I know that many of our patrons (particularly the students) have to deal with a lot of bureaucratic situations on campus (e.g., straightening out issues with financial aid, student visas, tuition issues with the bursar, course enrollment problems with the registrar, etc.) There is also the issue of anxiety that many users feel when confronted with the need to use the library for research (my colleague, Gerry Jiao has written extensively on this topic).

The better I can convince the patron that I am truly interested in his or her question, that I let them know that he or she has come to the right place to get help, the more likely it is that the reference interaction will go well. If telling the patron a bit about myself is what it takes to build that relationship of trust with the user, then that's what I'll do. Of course there are limits to what I'll disclose; I try to use my professional judgment to decide at the time what is inappropriate. I think most discussions about what is and what isn't suitable for a librarian to reveal generally depend on a number of contextual details about particular reference interactions.

At the reference desk, establishing that relationship with the user is a bit easier than in chat, where we have far fewer cues (particularly the nonverbal ones) that indicate a meaningful bond of communication and trust has been formed between librarian and patron. Perhaps in chat the value of sharing personal information where appropriate and reasonable is even more critical than at the reference desk, where we have other ways to form a bond (albeit one that is often short-lived) with the patron.

Let's not also forget that for most of our patrons the idea of chatting online with anyone other than a friend or co-worker (or maybe a client) is still a bit of a novelty. Back in the late nineties, when librarians first looked with envy at the fancy chat software used by online merchants like L.L. Bean and Lands End, it was often assumed that in the coming years our patrons would all be familiar with the idea of chatting online for customer assistance. As someone who resorts to the web for all sorts of personal consumer needs (shopping, tech support for items I have bought, etc.), I am surprised by how rarely I see a chat service for customer support. Six years ago, when I first started investigating how our library could set up chat reference service, I never would have imagined that chat would still continue to be a rarity on consumer-oriented web sites.

When I get questions in chat reference from students who want to know, "Are you a robot" or "Where are you located," I know not to automatically assume that the student is just fooling around or asking inappropriate questions. They really want to know because our chat services are still novel to them. And I can understand the impulse, too; many times I've wanted to ask a customer support rep that I've been on the phone with for a while, "Where are you?" Hey, I'm curious. I also know that I appreciate it when the customer support person truly feels sympathetic and interested in the problem I am calling for help with. (For an example of a person getting unsympathetic customer support, check out this recording made by someone trying to cancel his AOL service.)

My master's thesis is now online

I just uploaded a PDF of my master's thesis, "McCarthyism and Libraries: Intellectual Freedom Under Fire, 1947-1954," at my personal wiki. Now that I'm done with my 2nd master's degree (it only took four years), I'd like to focus on doing some writing for publication on some aspect of anticommunism and American libraries, perhaps looking more deeply into one of the many stories I covered in my thesis about how librarians and library organizations responded to the pressures of McCarthyism.

At the same time, I also expect to start pursuing some research interests I have into chat reference services. Since I last published an article in a peer-reviewed journal (my one and only) five years ago, there's been a ton of research in this area that I want to catch up on and contribute to in a more analytical way than my musings here in this blog.

With those concerns in mind lately, I found Steven Bell's recent posts on ACRLog about academic librarians and the need to publish to be timely and compelling:

• Where Do Good Publishing and Presenting Ideas Come From
• Tenure-Driven Publishing and Presenting Need Not Be a Grind

Getting beyond the mechanics of search

There's a great new list called ngc4lib that is officially devoted to discussions of the "next generation catalog." In its brief existence so far, it has launched dozens of fascinating conversations that extend far beyond what you might expect a "catalog" discussion to touch upon.

One quote in a recent message that really resonated with me came from Thomas Arendall-Salvetti, a reference/instruction librarian at the University of Baltimore:

I would like to echo what Emily Lynema has said: “Why don't we smarten up the catalog back-end so that we can dumb down the front-end interface and still have it work well?” Amen. Critics who complain of dumbing down the catalog have it all wrong. We want smarter OPACS that will do more of the behind the scenes work and make searching simpler for our patrons.

This ties in well to what Dan Lester has said about “upgrading info skills” and educating users about when to search different types of sources. If the library catalog and online databases were truly easy for our patrons to use, we could spend less time teaching the mechanics of searching and more time teaching higher order information literacy skills. As an instruction librarian, I would love to be able to spend all of my time teaching students when to use various types of information, how to evaluate information, how to use it ethically, etc. Smarter catalogs would lead to better library instruction.

I couldn't agree more. I would love to have more time in my workshops teaching about who creates information, how information gets disseminated, and how some kinds of information dominate the information ecology.

One of the exercises I would like to have time to do more often with students asks them to make a map of who might be likely information producers (i.e., authors) on their given topic and where those producers might be publishing. I give the students a blank map template for them to fill out for an in-class exercise. In the center of the map in a small box, the student writes in one or two sentences what his/her topic is. Surrounding the box where that topic is written is a series of circles, each of which has a line connecting it to the topic box in the center. I ask the students to write in each circle the name of one information producer. For example, if the student had written as a topic, "Assault rifles should be outlawed in the United States," then the student might write in the circles for information producers: politicians, journalists, advocacy groups (e.g., NRA, gun control groups), legal scholars, criminologists, and the law enforcement community.

Surrounding each circle for an information producer are a list of common forms of information: books, magazine/newspaper articles, journal articles, web sites. The student then must circle those forms of information that seem to be the most likely places that information producer would be writing on that topic. So for "advocacy groups," the most likely place might be "web sites." For "criminologists," it might be "journal articles" and "books."

Here's the blank template for the map.

Before letting the students start their own maps, I might first walk them through an already filled out topic map to explain the exercise. At other times, I changed the exercise by having the class all write in the same research topic and then, with the students volunteering who would be information producers and where they would likely be publishing, work with me to fill out the information producer map.

As a teacher, my expectation is not that students will thereafter regularly generate such a map every time they have an information need; instead, I am interested in having them begin to think a bit more systematically about where they might find information. I tell students that if you have a good sense of who might be producing information on a given topic (for example, psychologists) then you will also have an idea of what tool to use find information they have produced (PsycINFO to help you find journal articles by psychologists). The more information producers you think might care about your topic, the more options you have for finding information. Having a list of information producers in mind also allows you to begin making critical judgments about which ones might be most useful for the information need you have. If you have a passing interest in learning more about schizophrenia, then knowing that is the kind of topic a journalist might cover in magazines and newspapers may be enough to lead you in right direction in your search; if you are researching different treatment options for schizophrenia, it helps to be aware of the fact that in addition to journalists who might write on this, there are others--psychologists, psychiatrists, physicians, and social workers--who are also publishing information in this area with greater expertise and depth.

On a related note, I should mention that Peter Morville recently posted on his blog his interview with Peder Soderlind, a Swedish researcher who has a similar exercise he calls "society mapping."

UPDATE 6-14-2006: The archives of the NGC4LIB list can be found here.

Indexing blog posts

For the past couple of years, I've been using a couple of del.icio.us accounts to index blog posts in this blog and in the blog for the reference staff at the library at Baruch College, where I am an information services librarian. Just today, as I was using del.icio.us to bookmark some recent posts in our reference blog (595 posts as of today), was struck by how many topics my colleagues and I have managed to cover since the blog was launched in September 2004. To see for yourself, check out this view of the del.icio.us tags bundled into rough categories.

For any catalogers out there, please overlook my rather folksy attempts at creating a taxonomy of blog posts. Hey, "folksy"..."taxonomy"...whaddya know, I made a folksonomy! (For an insightful discussion of what a folksonomy really is, see "The Hive Mind: Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging," a post by Ellyssa Kroski on her blog, InfoTangle.)

LISwiki turns one year-old

Congrats to John Hubbard for launching the LISwiki one year ago. Check out his post about the current status of LISwiki and his hopes for its future.

One thing that I've found immensely useful about the site is the "Chat Reference Libraries" page, which updates my defunct list that I stopped maintaining three years ago. Going the wiki way made the most sense for such a list, as it is just too much for one person to manage.

Subscribe to feed via email

If you'd prefer to receive my feed via email, I've added a box (scroll down a bit and look on the right to where it says "Subscribe to Blog Updates) where you can enter your email address. I set this up a month ago on the blog for reference staff at the library where I work and have been pleased with the results so far (if you check this blog, you'll see that I'm much more prolific there than here).