This article is more than 5 years old.

Sorry this post is running a day or two behind, but wifi is hard to come by during my days!

I have mixed feelings about preconferences in general. I’ve been to a few good ones, but most I’ve attended were not worth the money as I feel they tend to be lots of people with questions and not so many people with answers. So it was with a some hesitation that I approached the RUSAMARS preconference ‘Reinvented Reference: Using our Collective Wisdom.”

The preconference had four issues around which it was organized: Staffing, Collaboration, Working with IS/IT and Assessment. The first half of the day was presentations on each of these topics and the second half gave us time to get in groups to discuss two of the four more fully. The two that are of most interest to me were staffing and assessment as we are facing the need to make serious changes in our reference staffing models, but we need to be sure we assess throughout the process to be sure we are staying true to the library’s mission.

First up was Bill Pardue, a public librarian from Arlington Heights Memorial library in Illinois who spoke about Reference Staffing. He made the excellent point that it is very expensive to keep desks staffed ‘just in case’ with librarians. Having librarians on the desk all the time is not a sustainable model. He made the point that small libraries have never had this issue because paraprofessionals have always been on the desk. He discussed different models of staffing and some results of study he did of libraries that had switched. The discussion that ensued also indicated that success was dependent on lots of thought going into the project ahead of the switch, rather than the switch being imposed from above without proper planning.

Brian Matthews from UC Santa Barbara (formerly of GA Tech) was the speaker on Assessment. He had a few timely reminders including the oft-stated, rarely practiced advice that assessment should be an ongoing, iterative process that should take place both during planning and implementation phases. He also feels that assessment should not be used to justify what you want to do – in other words don’t say “Let’s do X” and then create a survey to ‘prove’ that X is what your patrons want. He mentioned that we should start by asking the right questions – what do we really want to know. He gave some great ideas of ways to assess in non-traditional ways. These include Bulls eye questions – targeted – visual way to answer questions, asking ‘The Ultimate Question’ (which is the name of a book). You ask ‘on a scale from 0 to 4, how likely are you to recommend your library to others.’ Another great idea is the projection exercise where you ask patrons to personify your library — ‘imagine the library is a person, What would they look like, what’s their personality, how would the act and interact with others, who would they be friends with, who do they resemble’ — The answers can be VERY telling.

The afternoon sessions where we broke into groups around these topics were a good deal of probelm sharing and not a lot of solution finding, but there was some good food for thought in both of my discussion groups. All in all I would give it 4 out of 5 stars and I came away with a couple really great ideas that I’ll bring back to RITS and the marketing committee. Sometimes the benefits of these sorts of things are not in the content, but in the sharing and in the realization that as rough as we may have it – others are in much worse position either because of massive budget cuts and/or clueless and unsupportive administrations – two things we are VERY lucky not to be dealing with at ZSR.