8A: Fifty Shades of Reference

Ever since class last Tuesday, I’ve been debating whether I should change the title of my blog to “Fifty Shades of <insert witty library pun>.” In the end, I decided the title of this post was apt enough, as the warm-up activity and subsequent events in class demonstrated that the intentions of the inquisitive user are very much like Mr. Christian Grey’s appetites: enigmatic and ever-so perplexing. The main question at the heart of class seemed to be “what does this user want?” with varying degrees of success when attempting to answer it.

The warm-up activity at the beginning of class started with a question from Kristin the User that was harmless, if not oblivious: “I’m looking for books like Fifty Shades of Grey by James. Can you recommend any?” Deliberating within my group, the potential response to this query seemed rather risqué at first. Do we just ask the first question that comes to our minds when Fifty Shades is brought up? Then, we decided to tease out what about the book she enjoyed, thus providing a pathway where we can explore different options that might suit her tastes. It was honestly like solving a puzzle, figuring out which pieces fit where and gaining a better idea of the whole picture once more pieces are assembled. Once we figured out it was a Nicholas Sparks was a topic of interest, it became easier to suggest books that fit the user’s interest, which eventually allowed for us to close the reference interaction.

Although it may not have seemed like it, the Fifty Shades exercise related quite significantly to the resource guide presentations, as did the transcript analysis at the end of class. Both the warm-up and the transcript analysis acted as bookends to a project that essentially attempted to anticipate questions a user might ask if they engaged a librarian in a face-to-face interaction. Instead, the resource guide acted as a virtual substitute, presenting installed pathways that led a user to a pre-determined solution, or at least a stepping stone to that solution. I thought that Celia, Alyssa, and Casey’s group gave a great example of this through their resource guide on immigration. It provided resources for many potential questions that aspiring citizens might have, such as “what pro-bono legal options do I have?” and “how do I avoid scams?” Anticipating the myriad of questions a potential user group might have is a difficult endeavor, for much like an aforementioned titular character of one of the most popular erotica books of all time, a user’s question is not what it seems on the surface. It contains multitudes, trapdoors that lead to nowhere, and a fair bit of confusion as to how it relates to anything. However, the duty of any librarian must involve taking the time to resolve the question that lies in front of them, whether that is in the form of a dynamic reference interview or a static resource guide.