Skills for reference staff

[Steve Hooley]

                I guess what I mean is that it's easier to have some techs
assisting the librarians than to find tech-minded librarians (although we
have several super-user librarians who give us techies tips from time to
time). My wife teaches English, which in the Composition areas requires word
processing. She is not, however. as she is quick to point out, a word
processing teacher, nor is she interested in becoming one. Anyone going to
her for computer advice will be as confused, and rightly so, as if they had
asked a car mechanic for info about dangling participles. 
        In The Future we'll all have computers, and no one will ever need
advice (and they used to say we'd all fly copters to work by 1997). But our
proud non-technical folks, who need us to turn the overhead projector the
right way, are too busy being librarians to study file transfer protocol.
Seems to work pretty well, especially for the customers.
        
>
>    In response to the two above comments, I have two questions to
>ponder.
>1.  What if you come from a large library that requires you only to do 
>Reference Searching?
>      You have a systems person on duty to rely on.
>      
>      Think logistics--is the systems person always readily available or are 
>      staff going to be in the situation of plopping an OUT OF ORDER sign
on the 
>      computer and waiting a few hours for someone to show up and fix it?  Is 
>      the systems person supporting other computers outside the Reference
area?  
>      If so, do the Reference computers always take priority in maintenance 
>      calls?   
>      
>      I think Ref staff should be trained in, feel comfortable doing, and be 
>      invited to do basic troubleshooting.  What I have consistently heard
from 
>      Reference staff in the libraries I've worked in is that machines and 
>      software are often made available for use *without* adequate basic 
>      troubleshooting training.
>      
>      
>2.   What if you have a Reference Librarian who "just is not 
>mechanically inclined"?
>       I should clarify this question by saying this person gets upset
>when a >C prompt appears on the
>       screen.
>     
>     I think this could be a whole new area of psychological research.  
>     With experience as both a reference librarian and a systems support 
>     librarian, I've found that there will always be staff who refuse to 
>     believe they can troubleshoot a machine.  Now matter how much you try 
>     to "demystify" the machine for them, they just can't (or won't) 
>     progress beyond a certain point.  Since most systems people are not in 
>     the position of being able to say "you must learn how to do this *or 
>     else*...", we just have to accept them and deal with their situations 
>     as best we can.  In fact, I'm beginning to believe there *are* people 
>     who are just not mechanically inclined, although how any of them got 
>     through library school is beyond me since there's very little basic 
>     troubleshooting that's more mechanically involved than replacing a 
>     card catalog drawer in its slot or plugging in a coffee machine.
>     
>     Christopher Platt
>     NYPL
>     cplatt at nypl.org
>
 
*+============================*
|   Stephen S. Hooley         |  Statesboro Ga
|  Romulan Tech Assistant     |  Home of the
|    Henderson Library        |  Statesboro 
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