Anne Powers
Fall 2008
Exploratory Observations and Classifications of Attitudes and Emotions in Community College Reference-Desk Encounters
Research Objectives and Questions: The purpose of the exploratory-study segment of this paper was to observe and then broadly classify the types of attitudes shown by information seekers and providers at the beginnings and conclusions of reference-desk encounters in Southern Californiaundergraduate academic libraries, with special reference to community college libraries. The research questions driving the study were: how do information seekers feel, as exhibited by their demeanors, statements, or actions at the beginnings of the interactions, when seeking the help they have decided they need from reference librarians stationed at college reference desks? How do they feel at the conclusions of the encounters? Secondarily, how do reference librarians stationed atcollege reference desks feel, as exhibited by their demeanors, statements, or actions at the beginnings of the interactions, when providing the help requested by information seekers? How do they feel at the conclusions of the encounters?
Method and Background: The study method chosen was direct exploratory observation of student and other patron interaction with librarians at Los Angeles area colleges. Two university libraries (UCLA’s College Library and Young Research Library) were selected because many Santa MonicaCollege students transfer to the University. The observations offered an opportunity to discover first-hand which library-research preparation and competencies were currently expected of UCLA students. There had been occurrences in the past when UCLA librarians had contacted Santa MonicaCollege librarians to complain that our students, from different classes, were overburdening reference-service points at UCLA libraries with research assignments they were ill-prepared to carry out. Since then, the instructors involved and the librarians here at the College have addressed the specific issues, but the occurrences pointed out a larger concern that needed to be examined: the role of community college libraries in preparing their transfer students for the rigors of university-level information-finding and information-using skills. To a large degree, the American Library Association’s 1989 “Information Literacy” manifesto has made it easier for community college libraries to frame their approaches to research. College systems have mandated an information competency/literacy graduation requirement (although Santa Monica College lags behind the field, as there is no Information Literacy program up and running as yet.) which promotes the teaching and learning of the skills.
The community colleges were chosen because they had similar libraries and librarian personnel, and similar student-body makeup, as far as ranges of age, ethnicities, and education level were concerned, with Santa MonicaCollege constituencies.
The study is based entirely on observation. Sessions of sitting in at the reference desk alongside the library’s regularly scheduled reference librarians and observing their reference interactions were arranged months beforehand. Scouting missions to become familiar with the library and to receive a sense of ambience were made in August and September 2008. Actual observations occurred from September to December 2008.
At these observations, Library users self-selected for approach to the reference desk; the librarians staffing the desks at the times of the observations were the ones who would have staffed them whether the observer was present or not. Anyone who approached the desk was observed, whether a student, faculty member, staff employee, or community patron, and no attempt was made to filter for any specific group or type of patron, except as needed for demographic analysis. All designations of age, ethnicity, etc. were based on the researcher’s observations and conclusions only. Visits were made at various times of the day between the morning and evening, and occurred on all days of the week except Sunday. The times spent in observation at a reference desk ranged from a minimum of two to a maximum of four hours at a time. Librarians on duty at the reference desks included adjunct and fulltime, males and females. All were professional librarians with MLS or equivalent degrees; most were assigned to reference exclusively, or had a combination of reference and bibliographic instruction duties. Two of the librarians had cataloging as well as reference duties. A valid encounter for purposes of the study was defined as: the eliciting of information, help with research, etc., from a librarian stationed at the reference desk by a randomly self-selecting, self-initiating library user and which led to interaction between the library user and the librarian and resulted in an outcome. Such encounters occurring during the observation periods were logged in a journal, with notations as to supposed age, ethnicity, and gender of each information seeker, and as to the nature and substance of each inquiry. Particular note was taken of “emotion” as exemplified in the body language, tone of voice, words, and facial expressions of the patrons. Librarians’ emotions were also classified. A rubric was devised to code the main types of affect noted. Sixty-seven encounters were logged over the span of the observation periods. The encounters were then examined and analyzed.
Scope and Limitations: Although the sampling is much too small for extrapolating generalizations across the landscape of community-college reference service, the results could provide valuable pointers for further investigation of more user-centered models of planning, preparing for, and delivering future reference service in community college library settings. Similarly, no appreciable treatment of such formal concepts as Information Literacy or Web 2.0 models were considered for this study, since the aim was to maintain as naturalistic an observation setting as possible and to focus on interpreting the one-time transactions of the reference desk. These concepts are, however, considered significant for any further and future research on the stated topics. Discussion focuses on opinion, since it is not based, for the most part, on information that has been documented, validated or truly empirically treated in this paper.
The discussion segment of the paper centers around how the findings of the exploratory study relate to the researcher’s previously observed and experienced reference interactions. The principal value of the study for the researcher is that it offers the opportunity to focus on apprehending the information seeker’s point of view instead of continuing to concentrate on the information provider’s viewpoint; which, simplistically stated, is that information seekers should be molded into conformity with pre-organized and pre-planned paths of cognition, affect, and action (e.g. how to learn to perform library search; how to feel about performing library research; how to go about finding a book on the shelf after doing the library research ). A review of the researcher’s conclusions about reference service in community colleges based on her own experiences is helpful for understanding certain inferences drawn from the observations and the search of the literature.
Further Research: More extensive and empirically valid study of attitudes of users and librarians toward each other in community college libraries would be cogent vehicles for championing more user-centered approaches to reference service. Research on the relation of such factors as age, ethnicity, language skills, etc. on the attitudes and feelings of information seekers in community colleges would be welcome. Of particular interest would be studies to produce broadly applicable collaboration models between community college student library users and community college librarians for lessening library anxiety, especially through the use of Web 2.0 applications.
Observations Findings
How Library Users Felt at the Beginning of the Reference Encounter:
Patrons who were observed and classified for this study initiated and finished a single encounter with the reference-desk librarians they consulted. As a measure of the success of their requests for information or assistance, their feelings at both the beginnings of the transactions and at the ends of the transactions were noted and classified. Library users exhibited several types of emotion when they were beginning their interactions with reference desk librarians. Twelve different attitudes were noted, examples of which include terms such as “eager”, “pressured”, “embarrassed”, “confused”, and “relieved”. These various terms were then classified into four broad categories, each representing both a value of “positive” or “negative” feeling of greater or lesser degree, and also an assessment of how patrons felt about having to come to the librarians for help. “Confident” and “Expectant” were terms used to describe the positive feelings observed, with “Confident” being the stronger of the two terms and describing users who were completely sure that they would receive the help they required, even before as well as during the processing of their information need. Library users who were “Expectant” showed optimism about their encounter, also before and during the description of their need: these patrons were hopeful. The terms “Anxious” and “Wary” connoted negative feeling, with “Anxious” describing the ones who exhibited the worst feelings about the experience, identified by such terms as “frustrated”, “embarrassed”, “scared” etc.; and the description “Wary”, identifying lesser emotions such as “unsure” and “reluctant”; these patrons were doubtful.
Analysis showed that the emotions most revealed by students fell under the “Anxious” category, with fully 48% of the observations. Twenty-two per cent were described as “Wary”; only 18% were “Confident” and 12% were “Expectant”. Library patrons observed in this study revealed negative emotions in 70% of the observations; only 30% revealed positive ones.
The charts below illustrate the breakdown of the types of emotions exhibited by library users:
Combining positive with positive and negative with negative aspects, the data permutes into an alternate display:
Attitudes of Librarians at Beginning of the Reference-Desk Encounters:
Librarians’ attitudes at this point were classified as “Welcoming”, “Neutral”, or “Remote”, with “Welcoming” denoting a positive, psychological reaching-out to library users sometimes even as they approached the desk. There was warmth and invitation invested in the encounters, and a sense that the librarians whose demeanors were so classified enjoyed their profession. “Neutral” described an official, businesslike, and efficient manner that was neither inviting nor repelling. Most of the observations fell into this category. The third classification, “Remote”, designated librarian expressions that were cool, cold, or detached. Sixty-six percent of the observations fell under the category “Neutral”; 31% were “Welcoming” while only 3% were “Remote.”
How Library Users Felt after the Conclusion of the Reference Encounter:
Attitudes of library users after the ending of the interaction were noted to be overwhelmingly positive. The possible ranges of feelings noted were classified as “Satisfied”, “Unsatisfied”, or “Limbo”. Seventy-three per cent of library users felt “satisfied” with the outcome of the transaction, while 18% were in “limbo” and 9% “unsatisfied”. Users who obtained the information, object, guidance or assistance they wanted or needed were characterized as feeling “satisfied”; those who did not were “unsatisfied”, meaning that they expressed a perception that their needs or wants were not met. Observed feelings falling under this heading were exhibited in a philosophical attitude, polite disappointment, impatience, frustration, or exasperation. Patrons whose feelings were described by the term “Limbo” proved to be those who were still confused at the end of the encounter, even though they might have actually gotten what they asked for. This state could be brought about by any number of circumstances. For example, a student who knew little about philosophy or literary analysis might ask a librarian for help in choosing a 20th century existentialist novel to explicate for a literature-class term paper. Although the librarian might finally succeed in collaborating with the student well enough to mutually choose the Albert Camus novel, The Stranger, the student might leave the desk as bemused as when she started her quest. For, although she succeeded in getting what she asked for, she still did not know how to explicate the work or readily grasp its philosophical underpinnings, even if the librarian subsequently helped her procure works that explain literary analysis and philosophical concepts. The illustration below offers graphic depiction of types of patron attitude after the completion of a reference interaction:
Attitudes of Librarians after Conclusion of Reference-Desk Encounters:
Librarians’ attitudes at the end of the reference interactions were also overwhelmingly positive. Labels for the different types of feelings observed at the conclusion of reference encounters fell into two categories: the positive value of “Satisfied” and the negative value of “Dissatisfied” (see illustration below). Ninety-three percent registered a “satisfied” feeling, while 3% showed “dissatisfied” attitudes. Librarians felt “satisfied” if they had done all they could to help a patron, and the patron showed appreciation. They also felt satisfied with their own performance as professionals, whether they had succeeded or not in the eyes of the patron, as long as the librarians themselves felt they had done the best that could be done with the resources available. Librarians were “dissatisfied” however, if they felt they had failed the library user or themselves somehow in a reference interaction—for example, failing to remember a source that could have helped a user until after the user had left the library; or only finding requested information for a patron after the patron had no more use for the data. It remains to be seen whether these results indicate the positive professionalism of librarians, or points to a gap between reality and perceived reality.
Conclusions
An aspect of the results of these observations is the indication that there is significant room for improvement in the affective interface between the library user and the librarian. While this is certainly not news, it helps to underline the need for work on understanding how to improve communication between the two segments. Attitude and emotion are large parts of information-seeking interaction between users and providers in libraries, but it is an area that is neglected in practice although not particularly neglected in the literature. Community college librarians, because of limited budget, staff, and time, cannot avail themselves of some of the opportunities for researching, publishing, networking, or attending conferences that their colleagues in other systems may enjoy. They have, however, very practical arenas for addressing the topic: library research and information literacy classes and workshops that they teach in their own institutions, and information literacy conferences and seminars for instruction librarians which are offered by organizations of the library profession. Although many librarians have been trained, from a pedagogical point of view, on aspects of “managing” predicted or predictable student behavior as motivated by emotions, very few have attempted to put into some form of practice the positive, user-centered insights of Dervin’s theories of sense-making, Kuhlthau’s information seeking process, or Mellon’s divinations regarding library anxiety. In other words, there needs to be a useful way of connecting theory with practice. Teaching the teachers, not just the scholars, is a constructive way to make a start.
Literature Review
The review of current literature largely published within the last decade for discussions of information-seeking behavior (ISB) in community college libraries yielded sparse results. Many publications, however, addressed aspects of ISB in other settings. An objective of the literature search was to identify selected major topics related to academic and reference librarianship in general, community college librarianship in particular, and relevant publications discussing them. Seven topics were identified, among them community college librarianship (Cruger 1977, Kirkendall 1982, Swanson 2006, Tolle 2001, Wheeler 1965); information-seeking behavior (Case 2008, Dervin 2003, Fisher 2005, Johnston 1999, Kuhlthau 1988, Singh 2008) and the related library anxiety(Bostick 1992, Carlile 2007, Jiao 1996, Mellon 1986, Onwuegbuzie 2004, Van Scoyoc 2003). Other topics included trends in reference service (Antell 2004, Banks 2008, Boyd 2008, Buckland 2008, Campbell 2000, Cassell 1999, Fenton 1938, Fields 2006, Hatfield 1992, Knibbe-Haanstra 2008, Metzger 2008, Sonntag 2007, Swanson 2006, Taddeo 2006, Wilder 2005); Web/Library 2.0, information literacy, and bibliographic instruction (Collins 1993, Kirkendall 1982, Murley 2008, Tenopir 2007); international/culturally diverse patrons and programs (Buckner 2007, Herndon 2004, Marcus 2003, Norlin 2001, Sully de Luque 2000); and assessing reference services (Gremmels 2007, Jacoby 2005).
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