Improvising reference

I had the good fortune to take part in this year's CLA conference in Montreal as a member of the Local Arrangements Committee. Who knew that event-arranging could cause so much stress? Not I. I was only involved in a tiny fraction of the planning and execution of the event, but it certainly was exhausting. As a result, many of my conference musings are introspective rather than strictly informative.

I spent much of the conference at the hospitality desk, at which we provided conference information, restaurant suggestions, directions, and information about all things local. From this central perch, I was perfectly positioned to meet people, to get a sense of what was going on, and to hear the conference buzz. I think I must have seen nearly every attendee! Conference postmortems and recaps emphasize again and again that one of the most valuable aspects of conference attendance is meeting people and networking, and so in this respect, I think I did well.

Staffing the hospitality desk was more tiring than expected. Just as at a reference desk in a library, there was a feeling of always being "on," ready to answer queries about things I honestly didn't know: best restaurants in certain areas of the city, art festivals, taxis, driving directions, drug stores, craft stores, etc., etc. And then there was the added pressure of acting as a reference librarian for fellow librarians! Of course everyone was very nice, but I was very conscious that they noticed where and how I looked for information.

More than once, I noticed that the exact directions I gave to a certain spot didn't matter as much as being able to put people on the right path and helping them feel confident that they could find the place they were looking for. The same holds true at the reference desk in a library. The overall experience of the encounter from the questioner's perspective is just as important as the objective answer.*

The feeling of being "on" and creating an "experience" for questioners reminded me of a session that I attended at the ACRL conference in March. In a session called "Improvisational Theater as a Tool for Enhancing Cooperation in Academic Libraries," Anthony Stamatoplos applied improv techniques to organizational settings. He emphasized the value of the ability of spontaneity when confronted with an unknown situation and the ability to "make something of nothing" given a set of circumstances. A reference librarian must take a vague question and shape it into an information search or instructive interaction to meet the user's unexpressed needs. Like good improv, creativity and flexibility are essential in the reference exchange, but it must fit within certain guidelines. Librarians must react to what they're given rather than making assumptions about questions and questioners. A librarian can't reject a query about an obscure citation, for example, just as an improv actor can't reject a prop or a party quirk. This theatre motif seems to be somewhat in vogue: another session at ACRL also focused on improv ("Whose Line Is It: The Business of Improvisation Applied to Library Instruction" by librarians from the University of Southern California), as did one at the recent LOEX conference in Albuquerque ("Beating the Competition: Librarian as Performance Artist" by Marc Mason of Arizona State University. Perhaps someone who attended these sessions could further extend the metaphor.

* Research on international students' library use supports this. For example, see
Curry, A., & Copeman, D. (2005). Reference service to international students: A field stimulation research study. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 31(5), 409-420. The answer provided by a librarian to the student in the study did not matter as much as communication behaviours.