January 30th, 2010 Brian Herzog
Patron comes to the desk and asks,
Are you Andy?
I say no, and he looks a little puzzled, but then continues:
Oh. We can’t make the projector work for our meeting, and when I asked for help and the desk upstairs, they said come down here and ask for someone. I forget what name they said, but they said look for the redhead, so I just figured your name must be Andy.
And yes, he was serious, but he did apologize when I said my name is Brian.
See Also
Posted under Library, Personal, Reference Question, Resources, Service | 2 Comments »
January 12th, 2010 Brian Herzog
I love Kate’s recent post about the words we use and the impact they have on customer service.
Language is very important. Just yesterday I had an unpleasant exchange with a patron. She came up to say she was having trouble with the printer, and I started giving her printer tech support. All of this was unhelpful, because she was actually having trouble with the copier. It was frustrating for both of us, and could have been avoided if I had listened to what she was saying instead of the words she was using.
I’m going to make a point of using Kate’s “yes, and…” suggestion from now on. It’s such a simple thing, yet it encapsulates so much of what libraries do right (and wrong). Great observation, Kate.
See Also
Posted under Library, Service | 1 Comment »
December 5th, 2009 Brian Herzog
A little elderly woman walked up to the desk. She handed me a call number written on a piece of paper and said,
I need a librarian’s assistance in getting this book.
This happens. Sometimes a book isn’t on the shelf where it’s supposed to be because it got misshelved, or a patron left it at a table, or it was recently returned and hasn’t been put back on the shelf yet, or someone just took it without checking it out.
Being a librarian not only means you spend a lot of time creating organization, but you also quickly pick up skills necessary to maintain organization.
Finding missing books is almost like being a CSI - you have to reconstruct the situation, to figure out where it ended up. Does it seem like a page misshelved it, perhaps by transposing the dewey numbers? Could a patron have picked it up, forgot where they got it from, and then just slipped it back wherever was easiest? Did a staff person pull it for a book display and forget to mark it in the system? Could a child have pulled it off a low shelf, and then left it on an even lower one?
I bet every library has that one person who seems able to find any missing book. At my first library, that person taught me “The Book Search” song to find missing books:
One Shelf to the left,
One shelf to the right;
Higher shelf,
Lower shelf,
Fight fight fight!
I still sing this whenever I’m looking for a missing book, but the last line sometimes unnerves any patrons who happen to be in the stacks near me.
So anyway, I walked with this little elderly woman down to where the book should be, and I was thinking about the most likely scenario that caused this book to go missing. When we got to the right aisle, I checked the call number on the paper again to start looking, when she said,
I can see the book on the top shelf, I just can’t reach it.
I’m happy she asked me for help, instead of trying to climb up on one of our step stools to get it herself. My name is Brian; I am a librarian, and I am tall.
Tags: book, Books, libraries, Library, misplaced, misshelved, missing, public, Reference Question, stepstool, stool See Also
Posted under Library, Reference Question, Service | 6 Comments »
October 27th, 2009 Brian Herzog
I know that as a library, we are here to serve the community. But on a day-to-day basis, I don’t work with the community, I work with individual people.
Are the two mutually-exclusive? This is all just rhetorical thinking on my part, but two interactions this month brought this dichotomy to light and got me thinking about it.
Situation 1
In my library, patrons are allowed to use a computer for one hour (or longer if no one is waiting). A patron came in to complain to the Director that our computers are full all the time, which makes it hard for him to use one. His complaint is that often, he sees kids playing games or checking Facebook for hours at a time, and he is frustrated because he wants to spend half the day looking for a job.
Situation 2
A patron who does a lot of historical research asked if we could digitize our collection of Town Annual Reports - and not just scan them, but OCR them so the text is searchable. That is, of course, a huge project, and we are in the process of indexing all historical town records, but due to limited resources, we’re not going to get to the annual reports any time soon. She got agitated when I explained this, and told me “the Library is here to serve the residents of Chelmsford, and I AM CHELMSFORD.”
Answers?
So, what is a librarian to do? In the first situation, the bottom line was that the patron wanted us to stop other patrons from using computers for hours at a time so that he could use a computer for hours at a time. In the second, the patron wanted us to scrap our project timeline for improving access to all Town records for all patrons so we could focus on the records she wanted.
The problem seems to stem from point of view. The library’s point of view is to serve all patrons equally, as faceless members of the community. The patrons’ point of view is that they want whatever subset of our service they’re interested in right now, without consideration to how that impacts other patrons.
Situation 1 - Fail/Win?
On the surface, perhaps looking for a job is more important than playing games or chatting with friends - but should it be up to the library to make that call? If someone “checks out” a library resource, be it by taking home a book or by using one of our computers, they are pretty much entitled to use it for whatever they want, so long as they don’t damage it.
This means that if someone checks out a book and uses it for the three-week loan period to prop up a broken table leg, they are entitled to do that. Similarly, if someone spends their hour on the computer playing games, that is their business. Libraries make information and resources available, not police how patrons put them to use. But to the first patron, us not kicking someone off a computer so he could (ironically) do the same thing they were doing is not providing good service.
Situation 2 - Fail/Win?
When the second patron said that “She is Chelmsford,” my first response (which I managed to keep to myself) was, “yes, and so are 32,000 other people.” We have to make decisions that best serve the community, and with a project like this, we’re thinking long-term. We just don’t have the resources to do what she wants.
But instead of doing nothing, we’re doing what we can, and eventually we’ll be able to digitize the records she wants. This project will not only improve access to our collection overall, but will also help to preserve it for future generations. Put like that, we’re serving the community - but from her point of view, we’re totally failing to serve her needs.
I know it’s always a balancing act, but it’s tough to tell a patron they are no more important than every other patron - that seems like the opposite of good customer service.
See Also
Posted under Library, Service | 6 Comments »
