Filed under: The Process
Classic miscommunication at the reference desk.
The Unshelved comic above illustrates a simple example of a problem reference librarians face regularly. Even discounting homonyms and intentional plays on words and phrases, there is frequently some potential for difficulty between the patron’s information request transmission to the librarian’s reception. There are issues of misunderstanding, perspective, ability to hear, accents, speech impediments, facility with the chosen common language, social considerations, emotional barriers, and even the presence or non-presence of other parties. One basic issue is the requester’s understanding of what they themselves are requesting.
Too often, the person on the other side of the desk simply does not know what exactly they need from the librarian, a situation that inevitably results in an inability to phrase any spoken request well. There are a few good signs that will alert the librarian to such a situation: a needlessly broad request (“I need a book on war.”), a request that is impossible to satisfy (“I need a photo of Jesus.”), or a non-request (“I have a paper to write and I was thinking about something like diabetes.”). Recognition of this problem can be made more difficult when the patron has a higher social status to protect as well as the communication skills to disguise his/her lack of clarity such as with faculty members or professionals in a given field. It can result in a cloud of jargon and details that are too often not helpful for the librarian.
In answer to the title question, what we do first is usually: ask questions in return. Questions like “Are you presenting this information?”, “What do you mean by such-and-such?”, or “Is this for a history project?” can tease out a better context and therefore understanding of what the individual is looking for. Also, we can provide the user with possibile strategies for solving the problem or some examples of information sources to help them understand a bit more of what’s out there so they can home in on something they can use. Do these work? Not perfectly, but they certainly improve the situation beyond an initial impossibility. It is not an easy process and tends to be managed haphazardly and without consistency.
What’s really needed is a more systematic and intentional method for handling these types of situations. There seems to be little in the literature tackling this problem (e.g. Sumati Sharma’s “A systematic approach to handle reference queries” – citation & full text) and certainly less than that in library science education in general.
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