RUSA Response Paper

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In the library profession, information professionals to have sets of guidelines to govern their actions within the library. For Reference librarians, the Reference and User Services Association [RUSA] (2013) created the Guidelines for Behavioral Performance of Reference and Information Service Providers. These guidelines cover multiple elements of the reference interview, from approachability of the librarian and the search process, to the follow-up of the interview. The guidelines are separated into three sections; general. In person, and remote. This is done to separate out behaviors that are not applicable to the physical or virtual interview respectively. Schwartz (2014) explains that “virtual reference requires that the library staff …show more content…

One in person, and one via remote chat. The in-person interview was conducted at a medium sized public library while the virtual interview was posed to a reference librarian at a large academic library. Both reference librarians were asked for book recommendations. The question was posed as “I am looking for some book recommendations, my boss tasked me with providing a selection of books on finance for various user groups. Can you help me?”. Each librarian approached the question in a different manner, followed the RUSA guidelines to varying degrees of success, and came to very different conclusions for my question. I compared the reference interaction to the RUSA guidelines, looking at the topics of approachability, attentiveness and interest, communication and search behaviors, and the …show more content…

Neither one restated or tried to clarify my information need. Furthermore, neither inquired about what research I had already done, resulting in multiple of the book suggestions being ones I had already found. Van Duinkerken et al. (2009) found during their study that “in only 29 percent of the reference transactions did the librarians ask patrons what they had already done. Instead, during the in-person interaction, the librarian dove right into answering the question. There were open or closed ended questions asked at all. This is consistent with the findings of Ronan et al. (2006) that as few as 31% of librarians took the time to ask clarifying questions. In the virtual interview, the reference librarian only asked two clarifying questions, one open ended and one closed ended. Her first question was “can you tell me a little more about what you are looking for?” while her second asked if the materials had to be available for checkout at the academic library. Though I was sufficiently satisfied with the resources provided in the end, both librarians could have benefited from asking further questions. Dewdney and Michell (1997) suggest the use of “help chaining” in which the librarian asks a series of questions to better understand the patrons goal. For example, knowing what my boss was planning on doing with these books would have helped narrow down the types of financial books needed. Their approach to

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