Colin left this morning for an overseas business trip. He won't be back until Saturday. It will be interesting to see how this goes, especially since it's been a while since we actually spent more than an hour or two apart. Meanwhile, married life continues to be pretty much the same, if on less sleep than usual which I'm not sure is cause/effect. The house is still much more cluttered than I'd like but it's a process. My sister was in town this weekend and that was fun, despite the stress of a bolt haven sheared off on one of her tires coming here. When she and Colin inspected it, it turned out the tire had been held on by one nut. So we took it in and got that all fixed up before she headed to the airport to pick up her boyfriend who's coming back from study abroad. Phew!
We've also been watching a lot of Doctor Who which is on Netflix and most episodes have captions. The second season's first episode (2006) did not, however, but Colin was patient enough to explain what was being said without overwhelming my non-multitasking brain.
I don't know much more about my job. The dean was out on vacation on Friday when I went to work and the secretary was also not there. I plan to call and schedule an appointment. Meanwhile, since it's not yet the fall semester and I haven't been denied any access, I'm still doing the regular online chat reference hours.
For the most part, I enjoy doing this. Almost everyone expects that they will be getting a librarian at their own library when they ask a question and I certainly don't blame them. I have yet to see a library webpage that explains that the "chat with a librarian" means it could be *any* librarian. Most people either take it in stride or get confused but then realize that it makes sense (after explanations). Some have very specific questions to the school and sign off abruptly when they realize I'm not physically at the school before I can find them a phone number or suggest that I can forward their question on to a local librarian. Then there's a vast number of "Where's the stapler?" questions - ones that I easily find the answer to by just looking around on their libraries' websites.
The easiest ones are those that are truly glad to get whatever you can give them, that are patient, and are willing (even eager) to explain further what it is they're looking for. It doesn't matter what the question is or how hard it is to find the answer; I enjoy working with these patrons. One person had a question that was more appropriate to start researching through Google and they were in awe of the idea of using "site:edu" to narrow search results to only academic webpages.
The hardest ones are those who are impatient and have unreasonable expectations. Or make assumptions. Recently I had an especially difficult one who assumed their school was "now farming out the reference questions to Illinois" and corrected my slangy spelling of "alright," warning me that I didn't want anyone to think those in Illinois were hicks. It felt like they were here to correct some random librarian's "mistakes" and trying to bait me with a topic not related to their question. For me to remain professional, it helps if who I am interacting with does the same. (Don't worry, I didn't bite.)
While I was initially tempted to just rant about this, I decided that a better thing to do was to use it as a way to show what works and what doesn't work when you're asking a librarian questions online. I read many librarian blogs and what I've said seems completely in the realm of what is appropriate to blog about, especially if it is to reveal how a service or approach is or is not working.
Mmm lunchtime! Then perhaps a nap ...
No comments:
Post a Comment