reference services

The Supposed Summer Slowdown

I started my academic librarian position in August 2025. During the first few weeks of my role, before most of the on-campus students returned and the school year started, fellow librarians told me two (main) things: that I should enjoy the calm before things got busy again, and that the first year in my role would be a learning year.

I took both of those pieces of advice to heart and I can say now that both of them were very true. There was so much that I didn’t know back in August, and I learned a ton over the course of the year that will help me when the next school year starts. (I still have lots, lots more to learn.) I also made sure to soak in the quiet before orientation started and the students returned. My library is on the side of campus that has all the first-year student dorms, so we had a lot of students stop by with questions (library related and not) over the first few weeks of the fall semester.

I also heard from many librarians that things tend to slow down over the summer. Fewer students are on campus, many faculty members are taking time away, and the pace just tends to move more sedately. I’ve been looking forward to some time to reflect on the school year and work on the list of long-term summer projects that I’ve been compiling throughout the past year.

A month after graduation, however, I’m still waiting for this supposed summer slowdown to start.

Non-Traditional Program Support

In my role, I support nine programs, all of which are master’s or doctoral programs. Some of the programs follow a traditional schedule and enroll students on-campus full-time, but others are set up so that students can work full-time while completing their degrees part-time, often almost completely online.

I love working with all the students that I support. Fellow librarians have told me that it can be hard to engage online students, but I actually work the most with students in the part-time, online programs, especially the doctor of education program. I’m lucky to have support from a lot of faculty members and program leaders to help make this happen. I speak at orientation sessions for each cohort of Ed.D. students, and a new cohort starts three times a year. Although it’s primarily an online program, the students come to campus for their initial orientation and for several weekends throughout the three-year program.

The week after graduation in May, I taught my regular library session for the new Ed.D. students, and chatted with many of the students after my presentation. This was a Saturday, and the students were in orientation sessions for the rest of the day. I’m used to a couple of students booking appointments after a session, but on Sunday morning, I was surprised to see four or five students who had booked research appointments for the upcoming week. I had hoped to get started on my long term projects that week, but clearly they would need to be pushed to the following week. I figured that the students who reached out had wanted to go ahead and meet with me to get the recommended meeting with a librarian out of the way, and that my schedule would get back to the slow, standard summer I’d been told about after that first week.

However, I also remembered something that the education librarian at another institution had told me when I first started in this position. She also supports Ed.D. students who start three times a year. She told me that often, we don’t get the same summer break that other academic librarians do, because with a new (and large) cohort of students starting for the summer semester, they need a lot of library support just like any students do – except that they need support in May and June and even July, unlike many other students who are only taking classes from August through early May. I was now watching my colleague’s caution play out in real time in my own job.

Adjusting Expectations for a Different Type of Summer

It’s been four weeks since graduation and three weeks since this new cohort of students started. The research appointments haven’t slowed down – in fact, they’ve picked up. Working directly with students is my favorite part of my job, and I’m thrilled that so many of them want to meet with me for research help. But what I’m also starting to realize is that I may not be able to save my big, long-term projects for the summer slowdown like some of my other colleagues – because I don’t have a summer slowdown. For this summer, I’ll need to find a way to complete at least some projects that need to be done before the fall. But for the next school year, I’ll need to think back to this past year when I had slower months, and plan to complete other projects then. Spreading them out throughout the year is probably going to be more effective for me than saving them for a few “slower” months.

The advice I was given early on – that this year would be a learning year – is still true. Until this coming August, it’s still my first year as an academic librarian, and I’m still learning something new every day. But I love to learn, and it’s one reason I became a librarian. I know I’ll continue learning in my second year in academic libraries and beyond.

Musings on Reference Services as Instruction and Formation

Some thoughts on the reference desk as a space for teaching, student formation, and care

It has been a few weeks since commencement, and the switch that many of my colleagues said would happen at the start of the summer when I began my role almost a year ago has happened. The reading rooms and common spaces in my institution’s main library are near-empty, the only commotion coming from staff conversations, campus tour groups, and facilities workers going to and projects in the building. Traffic at the reference desk has also slowed considerably, creating the benefit of a much slower pace and offering the benefit of more time to get work done but also the challenge of staying vigilant of users who might approach with questions. As I’ve adjusted to this change in atmosphere and tempo, I’ve started to think more deeply about the past semester and how I can improve my own reference practice. One improvement I have been thinking about is how to better incorporate instruction into interactions I have with users, especially students.

Reference as Formation and Care

As I think about how I can connect my reference and instruction work more closely together, I am also trying to be realistic that most of the questions I will receive will likely be directional and about our policies, while fewer will concern the type of needs (namely research or citation support) that would make formal instruction necessary. Despite this, I want to make sure every interaction I have, no matter how brief or transactional, has instruction as part of a continuum of formation and care. Within the context of my Catholic Jesuit institution, this continuum looks like putting into practice the term cura personalis (“care for the whole person” in Latin) which is a Jesuit spiritual practice that emphasizes holistically paying attention to and caring for the mind, body, and spirit of ourselves and others (Otto, 2013). This continuum also looks like forming users into individuals concerned not just with acquiring knowledge but also better understanding their moral and ethical centers and how their bodies respond to social conditions around them

Who do I Serve?

In the eight months or so that I have staffed my library’s reference desk, I have encountered a range of different requests. Undergraduate and graduate students in search of help finding sources for an assignment or dissertation, course reserves, or a quiet spot to study. Prospective students and their families requesting building directions and the best place to get lunch on campus. Faculty searching for access to an award-winning film or an out-of-print novel. New staff from other departments wanting confirmation that, yes, their benefits do extend to library material access. Visiting scholars from other states or countries bearing a page full of call numbers. Alumni requesting copies of yearbooks or transcripts from the last century. Residents of communities surrounding the university who inquire about using WiFi or guidance on navigating municipal government services.

These are just a few of the users who have stopped by the reference desk, usually short on time and having unsuccessfully looked for the thing they needed on their own, even if that thing might not be fully understood and require dialogue with someone else to define and find. I have found when dialoguing with users that I have had to practice engaging with and excavating the explicit and implicit elements of users’ needs with patience, empathy, care, and respect, making sure that interactions end with a path toward a thing (be that a physical or electronic material or a referral to another area of the library) they can hold. I am constantly trying to improve my use of dialogue to chart a path for users in their scholarly or information search. I am also recognizing more and more that reference is also not just about getting to users’ core needs but using those interactions as opportunities to provide instruction on library-use, research, and more.

Fostering Connections Between Reference and Instruction

Though it might seem easy to categorize reference work and library instruction as two different areas, I have noticed quite a bit of overlap between them. In the case of reference and one-shot instruction, both appear to have a transactional quality: users receive information they need or are referred to someone/place else with an answer, and the interaction ends without expectation that the user will come back in the future. Both require adherence to strictly marked out time slots and teach users directly or indirectly fundamental skills in searching for and evaluating information and navigating library systems. On the flip side of the transactional overlap I mentioned, both carry the opportunity, even if not guaranteed, of relationship-building. There is a name and face that a user gets for the help they received, making it possible that they will return with another need.

Where do I hope to go?

Going forward, one other point of overlap between instruction and reference work I want to focus on is the potential of both to help form students into informed citizens and critical thinkers. There are a few ways I think I could make this happen. First, I might devote more time to providing attention and care in each reference interaction by not rushing a user to an answer but slowing down and working with them to discern from source/s of information: “what do I need?” “What am I curious about?” “What questions am I discovering?” Second, I might help patrons interrogate sources of information for power dynamics, privileged voices, biases, and harmful and oppressive ideas and systems of knowledge embedded in them. Third, I might model the habit of getting informed about the somatic and psychological condition of others and how they are searching for and processing information by asking how their semester has gone, what they have enjoyed, and what they are struggling with. While I know these three approaches won’t be possible in every interaction, I do want to keep them available as another tool in my reference kit that I can bring out when the moment is right.

References

Otto, A. (2013, August 15). Cura Personalis. Ignatian Spirituality. https://www.ignatianspirituality.com/cura-personalis/

The Trap of Knowing

I knew this moment would come, but I didn’t expect it to come as soon as it did. Until that moment, I had begun to settle into my first semester as an instruction librarian, my ease growing as the content I taught introducing our library’s resources, databases, and basic research and information literacy strategies to first-year undergraduates became increasingly familiar in each one-shot instruction session. You could also say this expanding ease carried with it some overconfidence as the (very few) classes I taught became increasingly predictable and required only minor tweaks before each one. This caused me to prematurely discard what more experienced team members and other colleagues who did instruction advised me: your first several times doing instruction will be bumpy with mistakes that smooth out with time and practice. When things are going well, it’s hard to see where the bumps lie and it’s very easy to trip on them, as I did.

In my second week of classes, a student asked me if I knew how to get to a resource our library had that they thought could be useful for their upcoming assignment. Though the resource sounded familiar and the path to find it likely was mentioned at some point during my busy, information-loaded first few weeks in the role, the answer was more hazy than clear at that moment. I voiced an answer to the student even as my brain was frantically catching up hoping I was right and wouldn’t be embarrassed to discover I was not. The rest of the class went smoothly, but at the end, when I debriefed with a colleague on my team who was observing me teach, they brought up my interaction with the student and noted that my answer was, in fact, incorrect and that my facial expressions exposed my uncertainty. They also reminded me that it was okay to say, “I don’t know, let me find an answer and get back to you,” and that such an answer helps maintain connections with students, whereas answering when I was unsure undermines the chance of a student’s connection with me and their confidence in my teaching. It was a humbling piece of advice that I have remembered and tried to follow in the weeks since. Even so, when situations similar to the one I had arise, so does the pressure to answer, even when I am not sure it is correct or not.

The Myth of the All-knowing Librarian

Situated close to the worn-out (and recently politically charged) stereotype of the cat-lady in a cardigan in the line of library bad takes is the myth that library workers can answer their patrons’ every need. This myth connects to another belief in our profession that library workers should be ready to sacrifice everything (including their physical and mental health) to serve our patrons. While I am not sure where these beliefs come from, I do know that they seem to creep into most of my role and are possibly influenced by my work background. Before I became an academic librarian, I worked as an underpaid office coordinator and administrative assistant at a different university. In this role, I was the knowledge hub for all matters related to office supplies, maintenance issues, office policies, and the schedules of the senior staff I supported. It was a job that required me to have an answer to any questions or issues within these areas at all times; moments when I could say, “I don’t know; let me find out,” were rare and always greeted with frustration and, depending on who I interacted with, the threat of escalation to my supervisor.

It is likely, then, that I carried this pressure to know everything into my first full-time academic librarian role. The irony is that I quickly found that the myth of the all-knowing librarian is nonexistent in my library, where there is a work atmosphere of collegiality, collaboration, and seeking information rather than assuming to know. I also soon discovered that our work culture is replicated in how we instruct our students. We teach them that the goal of research is not to know everything about a topic, but enough to enter into conversation with others who have studied it and form individual ideas and conclusions based on what they uncover.

It’s Okay Not to Know

One of the main things I’ve had to work through this semester is the discomfort of uncertainty. I have learned that confessing what I do not know is not a sign that I am unprepared or incapable of teaching but conveys honesty and allows students to contribute their knowledge. As one of my colleagues reminded me recently, “We learn from our students as much as we teach them.” Whether it be an instruction session or a reference interview, academic library workers are responsible for cultivating an environment where knowledge and learning can flourish. While this responsibility might not be met 100% of the time, we can always work toward it. Working toward this environment requires the humility and willingness to recognize our boundaries of understanding and admit what we do not know.

Reflecting on Reference Services

A colleague recently invited me to speak in an LIS graduate class she teaches on information services. I was delighted to have the chance to talk with her students; it was even more of a treat since I attended the same graduate program for my MLIS, and the information services course was the very first course I took in my program (mumble-mumble) years ago.

The students in the course are varied in their career goals, and not all are aiming for academic librarianship or public services work. So while I did speak about how my coworkers at City Tech and I think about reference work in the library at our large, public, technical and professional degree granting college in New York City, I also tried to contextualize reference services not just within the organization of the library, but also within the college, university, and city.

As I’m sure is not unusual for colleges like City Tech, reference for us is not just about answering questions about staplers and printers, or helping students navigate databases and the catalog to find sources for their research projects. Reference at City Tech also involves questions about the college and university. The library is the only place on campus that is open for many hours in the evenings and weekends (and we don’t even have overnight hours). We’re also one of the few spots on campus with a person sitting at a desk that’s highly visible (our reference desk is just inside the library entrance), and that features a sign that directs folks to ask for help (ours reads “Ask a Librarian”). At our reference desk we get all the questions: about technology, logging into wifi, the learning management system, registering for classes, filling out financial aid forms, etc.

So lots of what we do at the reference desk at my college looks like answering questions though also sending students to other places on campus. And that has led to discussion among our library faculty; do we still need a traditional reference desk when traditional reference questions are not always the kinds of questions we get?

Lots of academic libraries have shifted to reference by appointment only, or personal librarians, or other models, but at this point we don’t feel that those models will best serve our students at City Tech. Most of our students have come straight from the NYC public high schools, where they may not have had a school librarian. Many are in low-income households, or are in the first generation of their families to attend college. Some have library anxiety — City Tech’s library is only two floors in the middle of a building and can seem so small and unassuming to me, but I have heard students say that they found it to be big and confusing when they first got to the college. Having a staffed reference desk can help the library feel like a welcoming place for students, especially new students.

We schedule a library faculty member at the reference desk during all hours that the library is open while classes are in session, and most hours during semester breaks. That said, we have made some changes over the past couple of years. Moving a technical support staff member to a slightly different location allowed us to reduce staffing by library faculty at the reference desk from two librarians to one. This arrangement definitely serves students better, and relieves librarians of having to spend lots of time reviewing details of our printing system with students (as I alluded to in a post last year). This change has also proved helpful in accommodating some expected and unexpected staffing shortages this semester.

However, there is still some tension in managing information services in relation to everything else that my colleagues and I want librarians and the library to do with our campus community. I’m not quite sure how things will change for us in the future — while we are interested in doing more course-integrated instruction and other information services work with City Tech students, faculty, and staff, it’s unclear whether we’ll need to shift reference, too.

A Reference Redo

Our reference desk is in an odd spot. Rather than describe the situation, I created the following hasty floor plan:

When students enter the library they don’t see an actual person until they are well past the stairs to the second floor. The circulation desk dwarfs the reference desk, and the reference desk is obscured by a giant statue of a naked discus thrower. We’ve cut down on our reference desk hours due to staffing challenges, and historically reference shifts have been lower on the priority list for our librarians (falling behind teaching classes, college service work, and meetings). This has left us all feeling generally dissatisfied about our traditional reference set up. Stats are down (not surprisingly), students tend to go to the circulation desk first, some bypass circ and reference all together and just come straight to our offices for help (which are just around the corner from the reference desk), and reference shifts are inconsistently covered. The librarians have a good rapport with students and faculty, and hold multiple reference appointments (some scheduled, some impromptu) with both groups throughout the academic year, but they tend to happen in our offices rather than at the reference desk.

Instead of continuing on with business as usual, our library director gathered us together to discuss reference services at our library. It was an informal meeting, but I thought her discussion questions did a great job at getting to the core of why we provide reference services, what reference means to each of us, and how we could potentially be doing it differently. Here are the questions that guided our sharing:

What is the purpose of reference services in the library?
What are your frustrations with reference services? With the reference desk?
If consultations with individual librarians are more popular, would an “office hour” or “by appointment” model work?
What are our users’ requirements for research help?
If the reference desk went away today, what would students do? What would faculty do? What would librarians do?
How can we improve reference? Can we?

The discussion was extremely productive, in large part because of the leading question: What is the purpose of reference? I would imagine that the answer would vary depending on the library and school, as we all serve unique populations. For our library reference service is about education, collaboration, listening, and sharing. There is (and will always be, I think) a transactional aspect to reference; students will always need help printing, finding their way to the stacks, or assistance with the new scanner. But reference presents a unique opportunity for librarians to build meaningful relationships with students. I get to know students much better one-on-one, while listening to their tales of research woe or triumph, than I do in the classroom. Sometimes a reference appointment isn’t even about locating information. I’ve met with students who just need to talk out an idea with someone who isn’t their instructor or research advisor. Reference services are a highly relational activity, but the model of reference we’ve been operating under until this point is a very transactional one.

One model I’ve been intrigued by recently is the notion recreating the reference desk into a “beta space.” In the In the Library with the Lead Pipe article, Beta Spaces as a Model for Recontextualizing Reference Services in Libraries, Madelynn Dickerson proposes a beta space model for reference services that would replace a traditional reference desk/area with a collaborative research space. According to Dickerson, a “beta space is a prototyping space, but one that focuses more on ideas than technology.” It’s like a research incubator in the heart of the library. In this space students and faculty could gather to work on research projects together, student work could be shared and displayed, and librarians could collaborate with students and faculty, offering one-on-one or small group research assistance. It’s essentially a learning and sharing lab that sits in a public space. What I love most about Dickerson’s idea is the openness and inclusivity it brings to reference services. By creating a space that is warm and comfortable we’re setting the stage for collaboration rather than consultations or transactions. We’re saying, “Come in and stay a while.” Here’s a rough sketch of what this might look like:

An artist and interior designer I am clearly not, but I think this gets the idea across. The space is built for discussion and collaboration. Where does the librarian sit, you might ask? My question would be: Does it matter? I ask that in all sincerity. Do we need to be at a desk with an air of place/authority, or can we float around a larger space instead? I like the idea of being visible, accessible, and sitting in a comfy sofa chair with a cup of coffee and my laptop, ready to dig into a complex research question with a student during an “office hour” or some equivalent to that in this space. I could see myself meeting with a professor’s undergraduate research group in the private collaboration space, going over the intricacies of their literature review strategy. I envision a lunchtime reception showcasing research from an environmental studies class project. I could also see a group of dedicated library peer mentors who could staff this space and provide much needed research help on evenings and weekends when librarians are unavailable.

As we begin the spring semester (tomorrow!) we’re going to study our reference services more closely, review alternative models to “the desk,” and talk to our students and faculty about how they prefer to gain assistance for their research. Of course I’d love to hear what model of reference you’ve adopted at your library in recent years.