A good place to start in a discussion of librarian approachability across cultures is to consider best practices as set forth by professional organizations. I’m going to start in the United States and will, in my next blog entry, explore librarian guidelines in other countries.
The American Library Association, in particular, has been quite active in developing guidelines for librarians. in 1992, ALA formed an ad hoc committee to begin developing a protocol for librarian behavior, specifically in reference work. (It’s shocking that it took the organization that long to come up with something!) From the document on the ALA website:
The committee identified several areas in which behavioral attributes could be directly observed, including visibility/approachability, interest, listening/inquiring, searching, and follow-up activities. These guidelines have been widely used to assist in the training, development, and/or evaluation of librarians and staff who provide information services directly to library users.
A few years later, in 1996, the American Library Association published its first set of behavioral guidelines for librarians, via the organization’s Reference and Adult Services (RUSA) division. The standards were revised in 2013 to address the electronic age, where reference interviews are often conducted over email, chat, and video services (such as Skype).
Rather than spend this entry going line by line through the guidelines, I want to discuss the ways in which RUSA’s reference protocols both benefit the patron and librarian, and reinforce existing power hierarchies within the library.
Benefits of the RUSA guidelines:
- Librarians are patron-centric; by following the guidelines, they place the patron and the patron’s needs/concerns at the center of the interaction
- Patrons are treated with respect and their interests with curiosity
- Patron-centric interactions reinforce the library as a place of learning, as well as a community hub where librarians are always willing to help direct patrons to resources of all kinds
- Librarians are able to gain valuable experience – professional and personal – if they stay open to patrons and encourage them to take an active role in searches.. reference interviews can be a parallel experience in some ways, providing both sides with newly acquired information and power
Drawbacks of the RUSA guidelines (or at least some problematic areas that need to be addressed):
- Language barriers, even within the US, are not really addressed in the guidelines; there’s an assumption that both parties – patron and librarian – will be able to communicate in the same language with equal understanding
- The guidelines don’t address some patrons’ physical and/or mental limitations; there is no mention of accommodations for such instances
- The protocols also don’t address labor issues, like understaffing and workplace conflict that might prevent the librarian from providing the level of service suggested (e.g. the librarian may not always be available to work a reference desk, because she/he is pulled aside to cover circulation)
Overall, I believe that the ALA/RUSA guidelines are incredibly useful primarily to library students and new librarians. These best practices definitely help usher new librarians into the library environment, teach them the basics of interacting with patrons, and provide a good basis for learning to be more approachable. However, I could see how seasoned librarians would find the guidelines difficult to follow given the limitations and expectations of their libraries. It’s also true that many libraries have their own policies – some match up with this document and others add to or eliminate other standards. (A simple Google search “guidelines for librarians” yields many small and large library systems’ specific guidelines.) It would be great if RUSA would once again update this document to reflect power and labor issues, or at least acknowledge these problematic areas in the introduction to the document.
Global Perspectives on Librarian Approachability 