Because of this status, my mom tends to think I’m a superhero. Instead, I sometimes exhibit not very heroic behavior where problem patrons are concerned. But, just as Wonder Woman had her lasso and invisible plane, and Superman had his Fortress of Solitude, I have a secret weapon that reminds me of the hero I need to be. It’s an article titled “Negative Closures: Strategies and Counter-Strategies in the Reference Transaction” by Catherine Sheldrick Ross and Patricia Dewdney. Published in Reference and User Services Quarterly in 1998, it won the Reference Service Press Award in 2000. The centerpiece of the article is the study of the negative behaviors librarians employ to end the reference interview including the infamous “without a word, she began to type” strategy. These behaviors have been observed by library school students employed in the somewhat controversial assignment of posing as patrons with questions. I won’t debate the ethics of the reference observation but I will note that I recognize the tactics employed by the librarians observed, not just because I’ve seen colleagues use them (in an eighteen-year career, I’m not naming names!), but because I’ve been guilty of using them myself. What are these tactics? I won’t cheat you of the pleasure of reading the article. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Okay, you’re back. In a nutshell, negative closure tactics include the unmonitored referral (sending the patron to another person/location without verifying the needed information is there), heaving the exasperated sigh “well, where have you looked?”, being dismissive of the patron’s question, expressing doubt about the likelihood of finding something before even beginning to search, and negative body language, turning away from the patron to type without narrating what’s being searched.

I’m one of those people who loves examples of what NOT to do. I used this article when I taught Reference and Online Services as an adjunct at Dominican and also when I moved to Baltimore and first met with the graduate student workers I’d be supervising. I’m a fan of positive reinforcement as much as the next person, but the examples in the article are so awful and yet so real that I thought the graduate student workers would appreciate the stunning lack of customer service and understand I wanted the opposite of these behaviors at the Information Desk.

So, why is this article coming up for me again? It actually came to mind after a frustrating discussion in our department about how to handle one of our problem patrons. Every library has them, and we’re fortunate that problem patrons are the exception, not the rule, in our place of work. Still, we’ve got them, and one in particular has us tearing our hair out. She’s an older woman who has had interactions with almost all of us. A non-affiliate, she  lives in the neighborhood and sees us as akin to the the public library. We’re open to the public and take patrons’ questions first come, first serve in the Reference Office, but I’ll be frank: this woman gets on our last nerve. She has called us and visited us to complain about a number of things that aren’t library-related (FWIW, we have no control over loud noises in the neighborhood). And now steam is coming out of my ears and I forgot my point. Oh yes, Ross and Dewdney’s most excellent article. We’ve employed negative closures to send this woman on her way, but she always comes back (and she predates my nine-year tenure so she’ll always be back!). We’ve let our personal annoyance with her distract us from helping her when she has a real question. And yes, sometimes she has real questions. Because everything can be traced back to pop culture, I think of a line in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy where a character admits he did something as a distraction, i.e., because I did this, I thought you’d be disinclined to notice that I was doing that. Because we sigh when we see her (much like the librarians observed in the article), we are already predisposed not to listen to her. So, I’m advocating a return to our Librarian Action Figure status, conducting a real reference interview with this patron, asking open-ended questions and then closing the interview when appropriate and making a monitored referral. Remember, Batgirl was a librarian, so superheroism is within our grasp!

For the past three weeks, I’ve been taking an asynchronous online class through ALA Editions called Reference Through Social Media: Developing Standards, Guidelines, and Policies. It’s been skillfully designed and facilitated by Sarah Steiner of Georgia State University. I’ve paid for this (well, MPOW will, once I get reimbursed), so my intention isn’t to rehash for free what Sarah worked so hard to create. I do, however, want to share the some of the takeaways that struck me. We’ve been proud, rightfully so, I think, of our success with social media. We’ve incorporated it into our workflow, we’ve demonstrated its value, and we’ve created an internal social media policy with guidelines for each of our platforms. And yet, nobody’s perfect.

What we’re missing:

An external policy: We’ve documented our internal policies up the wazoo, but if you didn’t work here and didn’t have access to our wiki space, you’d have no idea why we do what we do. Transparency and openness are two watchwords that guide our internal communication, and they need to extend to our external communication. Fortunately, Week 1′s assignment was to write an external policy for our library. Now to get it approved and posted.

Greetings: One of the most eye-opening takeaways was the feedback that Sarah’s library received that patrons contacting a library via chat expected a response within 30 seconds. Please note, that’s a response, not an answer. To back up slightly, we were very late to the chat party, and I take the blame for that as I twisted myself into knots trying to figure out how it would be scheduled. It took a new colleague to tell me that at her former place of work, they had simply covered chat from the reference desk. Duh! And so we rolled it out last August, just in time for the fall semester. We’ve been using Meebo, with the chat widget placed on our Ask a Librarian and any LibGuide that’s been “authored” by Ask a Librarian so we get a fair amount of business via chat, even without the widget on the home page. This long-winded backstory is to provide context for our current situation, in which we do not reply to chats within 30 seconds. A variety of reasons account for this–we leave the Reference Office to help out at the Information Desk and forget to set chat to “away,” we’re working with a patron in person or on the phone and again, forget to set chat to “away,” or we simply don’t have the speakers turned up high enough for our audible cue that we’ve got an incoming chat. I think in chat our patrons understand multi-tasking. After all, they’re online too as they’re asking their question, searching databases, posting updates to Facebook, but it is entirely appropriate and desirable that we acknowledge them with at least a “hello, I’ll be right with you” reply. As Adriane commented to the department when we were discussing why we do what we do, a virtual interaction is still an interaction. Not acknowledging a virtual interaction is akin to not acknowledging a patron when he or she walks into the reference office to ask a question. We don’t need to provide the answer immediately but we need to acknowledge that we’ve received it and that it’s important to us.

Legalese: Libraries are champions of rights and patron privacy and are opposed to censorship but I imagine that many of us may not consider the implications of deleting comments to our blog or FB page that we find offensive. Turns out we DO need to consider those implications. In Sarah’s work on drafting an external policy for Georgia State, she discovered that “publicly funded institutions may not judge what content is offensive or racist,” (read Sarah’s excellent article with Brian Kooy) and this extends to private institutions that receive public funds. We’re one such institution and to my chagrin, in our About page for our blog, we did have language that said we reserved the right to not post any comments that we deemed offensive (and to show you how long it had been since we looked at this page, it also said something along the lines of “give us feedback on this new venture”–we started the blog in 2007). We quickly cleaned up that page, but Sarah alerted me that our statement “Please be advised that all comments and suggestions can be anonymous and are moderated for clarity, brevity, and appropriateness” needs to be vetted by university counsel. When we provide the medium for communication and feedback, we can’t decide what feedback we don’t want to receive.

The bottom line is that although we’re doing many things well (yea us!), there’s still room for improvement (continuous learning is part of the librarian’s job). And, these three takeaways are all items that benefit the patron. That’s what we’re all about, so thanks Sarah, for a great course!