Spot the librarian

No, I’m not talking about this:

…but about our visibility in our own buildings.

With the push to meet our users where they are, both online and in our communities, we need to take a look at how close we get to our users in our own buildings. It affects how well we serve our customers and how well people understand what we do.

In most places I’ve worked, the majority of library staff who were in the front line and greeting people each day weren’t librarians. Well - they weren’t librarians to those of us who know that a librarian is someone with a formal tertiary qualification in librarianship. But - to our customers, I’m sure that they were the librarians. Not us. We were probably “the bosses”, or - even worse - they didn’t even know we existed.

Yes, some libraries had a reference desk with a librarian sitting at it, ready to use that degree to provide tip-top 100% certified researching accuracy. But did the customers know they were any different to the staff elsewhere? And - here’s the clincher - did it matter? Is it actually important that our customers know the difference?

Probably not for many simple enquiries. Most libraries have clear guidelines about when a question gets redirected to a “professional” (a term I HATE ). Most clerical staff I’ve met are caring, intelligent folk who would redirect sensibly. Do we need our customers to know the difference for any other reason?

Well, yes. If we want political support from our users to ensure that our jobs are funded, they should understand what we do. If we want them to understand that our back room is full of people with different and useful knowledge and skills not possessed by the intelligent, caring folk they interact with each day.

We are paid to know about new web tools, children’s literature and the best way to retrieve an item. We can purchase items on their behalf, are able to design programs to suit their needs, can arrange outreach services for parts of the community to which they belong and are able to partner with them to provide mutually beneficial services. We can create resource guides or training classes. We can redesign areas of the library to better meet their needs. We can act on the changes they want in the services.

How can we ensure that a customer on the floor of our library, playing “spot the librarian” actually sees some of us? It’s hard to come up with any ways, because so much of what we do is back room work. I’m disallowing moves like “keep a blog outlining what you do”, or “put events on your website” or “write an Ask a Librarian column for your campus newspaper”. How about locating some of our offices near where the users are and putting a “please ask me a question” sign on our doors? How about an “open house” kind of class where people know they can get help with web tools at the public PCs during certain hours a week? There must be more, but I’m baffled if I can think of many.

If people think of libraries as “places where books are”, then with the shift in definition of content, our libraries may be in trouble. But, if our customers define libraries as “places where librarians are”,  then libraries may survive longer.