Skills for reference staff -Reply

[KAREN SCHNEIDER]

Learning new skills can be so frightening that the payoff is not
always visible.  Quite often people don't want to be vulnerable
and admit that they don't have skills.  Compassion is essential,
training necessary, patience of the essence.  However,  these
days our skill set includes minimal automation skills.  Not
everyone should become a librarian, and it should be understood
that librarians that can't fulfill all competencies should either seek
library positions where these skills are truly not needed (if such
jobs exist) or at least understand that their job performance affects
their career advancement.  Folks who have risen to where they
are going and refuse to learn new skills must be gently
incorporated into the mix... but that's true in every profession.

The other message to send these folks is that the payoff in terms
of improved customer service is great (which will motivate some
folks, depending on their "care factor").  Some users deliberately
seek us out for minor automation assistance because of our
kinder, gentler approach.  We may not know as much as the
"real" techies but we are compassionate and empathetic, and
often can identify the problem and potential solutions  very
quickly, and we are focused on the information objective. (That
CD doesn't work?  Did you run your CD update icon?  By the
way, did you know we had a better resource for that question? 
Oh, yes!  And we offer a class on those databases... by the way,
that's a very nice sweater you're wearing... did you see the latest
issue of Nature with the article related to your program... you can
get the table of contents over the Internet... it's on our webpage...
 Etc.)

As for the library professor posing the "power down" scenario... 
If the computers are down in this library, we tell folks we can't do
much except write down their questions and call them back later.
I'm not too enthralled with the idea  that a "good" library can
support older technologies if that isn't relevant to its environment.
 What are we supposed to do, put the Internet on microfiche and
then view it with candlelight readers?   If we can't search the
cmputer, we can't search the catalog; most of what we want is
online; even if we can find a little--we know we're missing the
bulk of hte information we're seeking.   And we increasingly
communicate with our patrons electronically.   I can hand
someone a report I know about, or root through a magazine table
of contents or two, but there aren't any paper indices here, nor
should there be.  (But we can still compliment patrons on their
nice outfits.)  Actually, if the power goes off in this building, and
the pwer fails to kick in, I'll be gathering up the patrons and
QUICKLY walking those sixteen flights down and outta here!

Karen G. Schneider/schneider.karen at epamail.epa.gov
Contractor, GCI/Director, US EPA Region 2 Library
http://www.epa.gov/Region2/library/