Spring means performance reviews at my firm, and reviews make me think about how we demonstrate our value as librarians. My earliest columns looked at reference and usage statistics as a means of tracking our services, but these numbers seem to only address what we do, not how well we do.
That is a question only our users—clients, guests, patrons,
and pests—can answer, and each might well give a different response. None of them see the three hours’ digging it
takes to find their answers—or the thirty seconds needed to navigate the
correct database—but each has come to us with a problem, and each will leave
with an impression of our skill—whether or not she leaves with the desired
answer. In fact, chances are good she
won’t have the desired answer: some studies suggest that reference librarians
‘succeed’ only about half the time. That
feels like a lot of failure, even when the client understands that answers may
not exist (if we’re lucky enough to have an understanding client).
How can we find success amid all the wrong answers? Joan Durrance, one of my professors in
library school, suggested a metric called ‘willingness to return’. This is as simple as it sounds: is a client,
upon completion of a reference interaction (‘successful’ or not), willing to
come back to the same librarian with another request?
This question goes to the heart of our profession. We act as information Sherpas, helping our
clients navigate an otherwise unmanageable environment en route to a goal. The desired path may be blocked; all routes
to the summit might even be closed. Our
task is not to carry the client to the summit, but to show the path (and do most
of the heavy lifting). We cannot control
the trip’s ultimate success, but we make our client’s success more likely, and
our own success is a reflection of our client’s success—as we tell every new
hire, we’re here to make you look good.
If the client sees our effort as a valuable contribution, she will
likely ask us for help again—whether or not we were able to find what she
wanted last time. The return question,
then, is our true measure of success, even if it doesn’t show up well on a
performance review.
Further reading:
JC Durrance, Reference Success: Does the 55 Percent RuleTell the Whole Story? Library Journal,
1989
JC Durrance, Factors that influence reference success: whatmakes questioners willing to return? The
Reference Librarian, 1995
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