Wanda Pearson, executive director of Brownsburg (IN) Public Library, often wondered how many people left her library discouraged after not finding what they needed or a person to answer their question.
She hopes a program that just started this week makes sure she never has that concern again.
“Self service is important, but there are people in a library who need help,” she said. “We aren’t a Barnes & Noble. We are paid by taxpayers and our services are paid by the taxpayers, so we need to be there to help.”
The new initiative, called the roving reference approach, puts a reference librarian near the front door to be more readily available to visitors. Every 15 minutes or so, that librarian pushes a cart with a laptop or just carries an electronic notepad and walks through the library looking for those who may need help.
“The Roving Librarian”…anybody got that domain snagged yet?
New initiative? Nope.
There is absolutely nothing new about this. In the early 1980s I worked at a college that had tried a program like this; they called it “Aggressive Reference.” Interestingly enough, it was abandoned as soon as the director who created the program moved on.
Where I’m presently working, the previous library dean also pushed for something like this; he wanted some reference librarians designated as “rovers” (yes, that’s the word he used) who would spend their shift walking around and offering to help people. This idea fell through due to budget and staffing cuts.
Absolutely
I agree…it’s not a new concept. But, it is new for our county…that’s all. In fact it’s gotten a lot more PR than we anticipated and all we did was throw it in our newsletter for our patrons so they knew we wouldn’t be at the desk anymore.
You never know what people will pick-up on. 🙂 But, we’re very glad to give it a whirl and patrons seem to be enjoying it so far. It’s nice being side-by-side with our patrons. It gives it a more personal, on-their-level kind of feel.
Been there…done that
We have done this at the large State Library that I work at. It didn’t work. Patrons still prefer to go to the information desk, and some seemed to find librarians wandering around positively intrusive. We abandoned it, the stats just didn’t justifiy it.
Librarians in general
Librarians?
Reference?
Who needs any of this? Ever heard of Google?
You can get Google on your PDA. Now that is roving reference.
not convinced
we’ve tried it too where i work (a large public branch library).
many people don’t like being approached; lugging around and looking up something on a laptop isn’t practical, esp. when reference these days might involve web sites and/or databases or a call to another branch; when you’re roving, nobody’s at the desk to answer the phone; people end up having to look for you when they need help, rather than an easy-to-identify desk; etc. etc.
it might work with both a permanently staffed desk AND someone assigned to roving, but who has the budget for an additional ref person?
nothing wrong however with doing walkabouts every once and a while to check out the floor and make yourself available whenever it’s not busy at the desk (it’s what we decided works best).
Not Well Managed
Sound likes your implementation was not well planned or managed. Many libraries I know that do roving, the answering of the phone is assigned to another librarian that is setting at their personal desk anyways. Also, an information or circulation desk still exists that can page the librarian on call.
Can you tell why “looking up something on a laptop isn’t practical, esp. when reference these days might involve web sites and/or databases”? This statement by itself does not make sense as the laptop is the very tool you would use to access all these online tools anyways.
Brian C. Gray
http://blog.case.edu/bcg8
use the whole sentence
It’s not the “looking up something on a laptop” that isn’t practical. It’s the first part of that sentence that you didn’t quote…”lugging around” the laptop. I have seen other libraries use a special table-on-wheels for their laptops for roving reference. To me personally, this just looked silly and often gets in the way of other patrons.
We’ve never had roving reference specifically implemented, but while shelving/straightening/shelf-reading/helping other patrons, we do what they’re calling roving reference. If we see someone who needs help or if somone comes up to us and asks for help. But we don’t have a person designated to do this roving at any given time. In my experiences with this roving reference, a majority of the time we simply had to direct the patrons to the catalog computers to look up specific items or authors.
Laptops
Many librarians use laptops all the time, either within the library or to reach beyond the walls of the physical building. If you get the proper equipment, and sometimes training, it does not feel as it is “lugging”. Depending on your specific patrons, it becomes well appreciated that help came to them, you can show them the answer live, that they do not need to lose their seat, etc.
People are even taking it further with mini laptops, PDAs, and iPhones.
From what you are describing, you are doing quite a bit of roving already.
Roving
Yes, we do roving. But it is not a mandated part of our job. Or should I say, we’re not specifically told to stay away from a desk and just wander around the building looking for people to help. We are expected to maintain the circ/ref desk and do not have enough staffing to operate the desk and do mandated roving at the same time.
Many times roving reference doesn’t work simply because of staffing issues. And things like PDAs, iPhones and the like are all nice, but many smaller libraries cannot afford them or cannot get approval from library boards and city councils for these items. You have to have understanding board and council members, as well as a decent IT department. And our library has none of those.