User Services and Programming Discussion #4: Adult Patrons
19 February 2025
Do some research on your own then share a resource with the class about programming and services for adult patrons. You may post either a link or a reference citation.
Now share why you've chosen this resource and what the big takeaways are. How could you use what you've learned in the future?
Reference resources. Every library has 'em. Every capital-L Librarian is supposed to have considerable knowledge about 'em. And yet, for all job listings and professional standards and patron expectations expect would-be library students to know about them, I genuinely cannot recall a single instance of anyone or anything gesturing towards what, exactly a reference resource is.
This does have an obvious answer: pick any library website under the sun and check the "resources" or "reference" or "database" or similarly-named page and look at all the things listed. Apparently, that's all the training you need to be knowledgeable, since new Adult Services trainees at my system are simply told where to find reference resources on the website without procedures on what to refer to for a given situation. Given that AS's interactions are overwhelmingly drowned out by tech support and notary requests with strict solutions than the open-ended narrowing-down of a reference interview, it's vanishingly rare that reference staff will even have to guide patrons to the piece of information they're looking for themselves. But having absolutely no training in reference still seems like a glaring omission, particularly for something that used to be one of the primary duties of library staff before search engines superseded (and eventually corroded) reference for most.
Enter my addition to this discussion's pile of LibGuides: Caroll Community College (CCC) up in Maryland has a LibGuide devoted to online reference resources across 16 categories (2024). At a glance, there's not much that stands out from other library resource pages: there's a combination of resources that CCC has contractual access to, and most resource pages divvy their selection into around 10 or 12 categories. Piling on another half of categories grants more specificity that ends up being less overwhelming: if someone asks for, say, "where to look up something about the government," someone referencing CCC's pathfinder is tangibly prompted to narrow things down between "government information" and "legal information," two interrelated yet distinct things. Meanwhile, if someone were to ask "what do people think about [X] political topic," there's easy access to reliable information, as CCC gathered together long-running polling sources that don't require a library login or proxy to access, across most other categories as well.
And in a sense, accessibility might be what makes this LibGuide so immediately useful. If I were to think "what kind of things would I be pointing a patron towards for [Y] specific type of question?," there's a good chance CCC's guide would have a suitable database available to search. I will admit this is all grasping at straws a little—since a given library's resources are specific to their community and thus much more likely to fit the interview. Still, if someone else needed immediate, easy-to-understand examples of reference resources, I'd point them here.
References
Caroll Community College. (2024). Reference resources [Pathfinder]. Retrieved February 19, 2025, from: https://library.carrollcc.edu/c.php?g=98666&p=639089