61elevenreference service in Person
When you’re listening to a patron, nothing is more
important. Not the patron you just finished helping or the
patron next in line, but the one who needs you right now.
Every patron deserves all your attention and interest.
—Donna M. Fisher, “The Important of Being Ear-Nest”w
hen working at a reference desk, you may have to perform a bal-
ancing act between answering a phone and helping a person right
in front of you. Even if you are fortunate, as I have been, to work mostly at
reference desks where you don’t have to also answer a phone and can direct
all your attention to the people in front of you (the reference telephones are
in a separate area), providing reference service in person requires a consider-
able degree of finesse. For the sake of this discussion, I’ll use the model I’m
most familiar with, a reference desk where all the attention can be focused
on patrons in the library. The RUSA behavioral guidelines recommend that at
the reference desk you should be “poised and ready to engage approaching
patrons. The librarian is aware of the need to stop all other activities when
patrons approach and focus attention on the patron’s needs” (1.2). How can
you appear “poised and ready to engage approaching patrons”? The answer
can be summed up in just two words: body language. When working at the
reference desk, sit up straight, constantly scan the room for patrons, make
eye contact with them, maybe even stand up (!)—or walk over to them and
ask if you can help. To put it bluntly, the patron is not an interruption of your