Stress!
Lemme preface this post by saying I dig and respect my colleagues. I’m about to go on a major rant, but please don’t think I don’t value my coworkers. I am frustrated and emotional and they’re just feeling a bit more like co-irkers than coworkers at the moment. It will pass. If any of my colleagues are reading…well it’s a free world. Go right ahead, just don’t get passive aggressive with me in the workplace. We’re all adults.
As you know from my long-ass-list-of-junk-I’m-working-on-right-now post, we’re trying to get our chat reference program off the ground at PCC Library. This means we’re knee-deep in conversation about how to staff this thing.
I spent months trying to get folks to have a conversation about these things only to be told “yeah yeah sounds good” about my proposed ideas. Sure we can staff chat from the reference desk, it’s just like another phone line, right?
Now that some “practice” (I use the term loosely, very loosely) has actually happened, the librarians are deciding that maybe staffing chat from reference is too hard for them. I don’t think that’s true at all; they’re just scared. I’m really struggling with my boundaries as the web specialist. There’s a real temptation to say, “You know what? That lady who signs the paychecks seems to think I have some expertise in this area. That’s why she made me the web dork librarian. Just do it my way.” Yeah, that will totally make me friends in my library. Only not.
I sent an email to the librarians asking them to have a little faith in me, in the proposed pilot service, in themselves, and to give it the ole college try for Summer and Fall. I made promises to review transaction data and anecdotal responses at the end of Fall and reevaluate the staffing situation then. Data, data, data I kept saying. Why? Because it’s wicked easier to get the boss to sign-off on proposed staffing changes (or, eee, possibly dig up a few more hours for us from somewhere) with numbers in hand. We served X students, Y per cent of whom waited more than 60 seconds for a response. Based on on X and Y we should really try Z for Winter and Spring.
I even had some comments from various managers who saw my email and said that it was a very well-written email that made a lot of sense. So why did I get back what boils down to a “hellz no” from one of our librarians?
I get that things felt scary during practice (when you didn’t even have real patrons yet) but I also know that some of the librarians didn’t actually practice. Of their own admission, whenever a triage situation arose, they just dumped their pretend chat patron. “Oh, someone’s here, gotta go.” Well, that’s not stretching your skills and abilities at all, now is it? You can’t get better at typing “just a minute please, I have someone on the phone. If you need to go make sure to leave your email and I will follow up with you there,” if you’re not actually doing that.
So I’m super frustrated. The counter-proposal from the librarians is to staff reference from shifts in their offices. Remember this is a community college, not some fancy-pants university library. We don’t have the luxury of office hours and pretty much all of our time not spent teaching and manning the desk is spent in meetings or prepping for eleventy-nine other things. So this alleged time in the office doesn’t even exist. To propose that non-existent office time should be used to staff chat is not especially feasible.
There’s also the issue of inequity between campuses. Everyone is stretched thin and doing more with less. For some reason (dates back to before I was here) our librarians really get off on finger-pointing and insisting that things were better before one campus stole the other campus’ part-time librarian hours. At the campus I work for, we’re generally pretty sure that we’re getting the shaft in this battle, but we’re over it. There’s a perception that we have more hours of librarian allotted to us, so we must have it easier. We also see more students, open reference an hour earlier, and often teach WAY more classes…but hey, whatevs.
So I have a lot of fears that this magical librarian-in-an-office solution will really turn into “why don’t you guys do it, you have more librarians”. Which will then boil down to, “Hey Allie can do it all the time. She types more quickly and is better at that stuff.” And I am willing to sell my time. Hour for hour, desk time for chat time—but I don’t think that’s what they had in mind.
I have a lot more I could say on this, but I’m just getting myself irate while at reference. Egad, I can answer questions, the phone, chat, AND write blog posts at the same time. Maybe I am a freaking genius.
</vitriol>
hey there…first off…ouch. this situation sounds super frustrating. i know just what you mean about the temptation to just say “we’re doing it this way because i say we are”. that kind of thing never goes down well in libraries though.
second…i know the LAST thing you probably want right now is a different idea about how to staff this thing but i thought i’d tell you what we’re doing that works very, very well. You’re using libraryh3lp, right? the beauty of libraryh3lp is that you don’t really HAVE to decide exactly who is staffing it at all times. the way we do it is: you have to monitor if you’re at the reference desk. you may *optionally* monitor it from in your office. The person at the reference desk is the “first line” but anyone may answer any IM. If you’re in your office and you notice it’s taking the ref desk a while to answer one, you pick it up because they’re probably busy at the reference desk. If you’re at the reference desk with a patron, you MAY set your IM to busy, *even though* that means we might appear “offline” to IM patrons if there’s no one doing back up in their office. We had a lot of anxiety at the outset about how the ref desk would balance in person and IM ref questions and it just hasn’t been a problem. When we first started there were just two or three of us who monitored the libraryh3lp from their office, now everyone does. Because they find it pretty easy and fun. We usually have the situation of being out at the ref desk and having someone in their office pick up the IM before you get to it. it really has worked well for us. i know we’re really small and we have fancy-pants offices and we’re probably a lot more comfortable with loosey-goosey “we’re just going to see how this goes” type stuff than pcc. but i will say that even for me personally, i really appreciate having the back up when i’m out there on the ref desk and having the liberty to just switch it to “away” when i’m super-super busy out there.
hope that helps or at least doesn’t add to your rage
hang in there, this will pass.