Two weeks visits 1 - Reference

I also visited the reference desk this past week. The librarian working the desk discussed what changes are happening in the rates of questions (increasing) and how technology is impacting them (more chat, especially as the service is more visible to the users on the library web pages).

We also discussed what a "reference librarian" does at this university library. They spend approximately 8 hours a week at the reference desk - answering questions in person, on the phone, and from instant messenger. Email questions are handled by other reference librarians on a rotating schedule. When not working the desk or answering email, the reference librarians assist in collection development and serve as liaisons with academic departments and colleges. They also provide orientations for students/classes and teach them how to make use of the library's services.

While I was shadowing the librarian I got to see a fairly extended session helping a student find business information from serials, as well as helping a different student start searching for information about Zanzibar. The latter case clearly was a case of helping get the student oriented and familiar with the catalog and the academic databases available to them.

I also saw an interaction where a student needed a particular article that the library did not have in print or access to in electronic form. So the librarian walked the student through setting up an inter-library loan request. It was nice to see how all the different parts of the library fit together; I'd seen the ILL department and now I saw an example of how such requests originate.