Week Six: Modifications


Hannah Hiles | 26 February 2016 | Durham NC


There were a lot of highs floating around last week. This week, I was running off the fumes of that energy – I'm definitely still reeling from the fact that I have so much input and impact on libraries and the community they serve. It's why I wanted to be a librarian in the first place; further affirmation that I'm in the right field.

This week, we had to pump the breaks a little bit.

Part of what we're looking to study with Rubenstein is how much time librarians at the service desks spend answering questions about Rubenstein. Questions like,

Where is the manuscript room?
Where can I study?
Am I allowed up here?

Initially, we 1) created a Google Form that would be kept on-screen at the service desks. It consisted of three questions that librarians could fill out when they had been approached by someone with a Rubenstein questions. It would tell us:

  1. What kind of question did the student ask (directional, reference, other)
  2. What the nature of their question was (a brief text box here gave the librarians room to write out what the students asked)
  3. What service desk they were located at

We thought it looked pretty swanky. And it was!

But then we sent it off to our supervisor, and some realities came back to us. Mostly, that Forms in the past have gone ignored. Librarians just don't respond to them. They go unfilled, they get forgotten. Even if they are used early on, they rarely are utilized for the entire block of research time. And there's no way that we as a department are going to harangue our fellow librarians to answer questions and pile on their workloads.

So, a new solution had to be found.

Suma is a reporting tool that we already use. We had initially played with the idea of using it for this, but scrapped it – Suma only lets you tap a button to record information, and that's it. We need more information than Suma can get us.

But when reality hits, you learn that sometimes, you take the information you're given.

We've set aside the Google Form and are starting with Suma. After a lot of talking, we've decided to start with a Suma button that librarians can easily tap after they've received a Rubenstein question. We won't know anything beyond that – just that at X time and Y desk, a question somehow related to Rubenstein Library was asked.

After we do that, though, we'll start Phase 2 – interviewing service desk staff to find out what kinds of questions they think they get asked a lot. Do they tend to get asked the same questions over and over? Do they think signage would be helpful? What can we put in their part of the library to make their job easier?

This week, there were modifications. But they were good ones – and they came with a lot of lessons that we'll get to take to our next problem we tackle.


1) myself and the second field study student