Episode 507: Answering Tech Questions

Welcome back to Season Five of Linking Our Libraries!

We are the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange. Our members are libraries of all sorts. This season we are working through some skills that people in any kind of library will need to be successful in their work.

In this episode we will talk about an issue every library staffer faces: patron questions or problems with technology, and how to answer them when you have no idea what is going on.

This week we have Guest Host Ariel Kirst, from the Great River Regional Library System to help us get some ideas!

The Basics:

Working with technology, and all the various technology tools and devices patrons will bring to your library, is an important part of any library’s service to their community.

The main problem here is that you may not have a lot of training (or any!), and may not know how to use these devices or tools yourself.

Sorry – we aren’t going to magically give you all the answers. We don’t have them. But we are going to walk through some ideas you can use in your own work to better answer tech questions – even when you have no idea what’s going on!

First, let’s review the basics of the Reference Interview.  If you missed our episode  213: Reference, a Reference Interview is just a structured way to be sure you are answering questions as well as possible.

  1. Look approachable to patrons. Smile, make eye contact, ask if you can help people.
  2. Do some question negotiation, to be sure you understand what they need. Ask for more information, or how it will be used. Use vocabulary your patron is using. Use some open-ended questions to get more information.
  3. Search for answers. Use paper and online tools, as well as asking colleagues, your library system, or other sources. It’s good to give a running commentary to your patrons, so you are modeling for them how to do this searching next time.
  4. Communicate your answer. Tell the person what you found. For tech issues, give it a try and see what happens.
  5. Follow up. This may be obvious right away, or it may take a while to know if things worked out. But check back to see how things are going. Otherwise someone who doesn’t come back for more question may be perfectly happy – or they may have left in disgust, never to return – or to vote for your tax increases!

Flexibility and a willingness to dive in and see what you can do will take you a long way in solving technology problems for your patrons! One of the most surprisingly things to newbies in libraries is how often you are asked to fix things. This is a list from a librarian blog of a few things she was asked to fix in her job at a Reference desk:

  •    Microfilm readers
  •    The photocopier
  •    Chairs
  •    Compact shelving
  •    The new photocopier
  •    A VCR
  •    High capacity staplers
  •    A label maker
  •    3-Hole punchers
  •    Digital microfilm readers
  •    Three different types of printers
  •    Shelves
  •    Book carts
  •    A doc scanner
  •    A different department’s photocopier
  •    Patron’s computers
  •    The wi-fi
  •    The new photocopier that replaced the old new photocopier
  •    Torn reels of microfilm
  •    Clocks

Do you know how to fix that stuff? Neither do we! This is a few years old now – you can definitely add in iPads, Kindles, off-brand e-readers, and laptops of all sorts.

Start by taking a deep breath. Then work your way through the Reference Interview procedure. And try some things. If the tool or device already isn’t working, you probably won’t make it worse, so try a few things. We have some suggestions on where to start:

  • The most obvious thing to check: is this device actually turned on, or plugged in? Is the battery dead? This solves a surprising number of issues. A sub note to this: power cords are just a nightmare of special snowflakes. But you would be well-served by having a micro and a mini cord you can either just give away, or check out to someone.
  • Next: turning it off and back on can solve many issues. Why? We have no idea – we aren’t tech specialists. We just go with the things that might work.
  • Ask the person what was happening as things went wrong. (Honestly, this may be of only limited value – people tend to “forget” they did something wrong, or not remember what was happening as things went badly. But it doesn’t hurt to ask.)
  • Before things start going wrong, find the manual for the printer or copier – in paper or online. There will be a section on troubleshooting, and it could be helpful to follow it.
  • Paper jams will happen – that’s a given. Spend some time slowly going through the machine to start finding all the places a paper can jam up. On most copier, this will be surprisingly complicated and will have lots of places to search. If you are ready to find some of those obscure places, it will help.
  • Setting in with Google, and start searching for solutions other people are finding. It make take a few searches to hit on the right keywords, but no matter what you are doing – someone else has worked on it before and may have some advice for you.
  • No matter what the problem you and your patrons are facing, if you can stay calm and have a reasonably positive attitude. Everyone hates tech problems; your intervention may not solve everything, but if you can keep everyone reasonably calm and show that you are working on the problem, it will help patrons to not get too upset.

We have talked about a lot of theories and ideas for policies and procedures; now let’s get more ideas from Ariel on how these work out in real library work!

Additional Resources:

We are providing a few sample ideas here. CMLE members – get in touch with us if you want to talk about your this in more detail. We are here to help you!

Books Read

As always, all the book information we are sharing here is from Amazon.com. If you click on a link, and happen to buy a book – or anything else – Amazon will give us a small share of their profits on your sale. Yay! Thanks in advance for your support!

The Better Part of Valour: A Confederation Novel, by Tanya Huff

Telling a two-star general what she really thought of him was the mistake Staff Sergeant Torin Kerr made with General Morris. But as a battle-hardened professional, she took pride in doing her job and getting her troops back alive. So after she’d saved the mission to bring the Silsviss into the Confederation – instead of losing them and their world to the enemy known only as the Others – she let the general know exactly how she felt.

And Torin’s reward – or punishment – was to be separated from her platoon and sent off on what might well prove an even more perilous assignment. She was commandeered to protect a scientific expedition to a newly discovered and seemingly derelict spaceship of truly epic proportions. And Confederation politics had saddled her with a commanding officer who might prove more of a menace to the mission’s success than anything they encountered.

Only time would tell if the ship was what it appeared to be or a trap created by the Others – or the work of an as yet unknown alien race with an agenda that could prove all too hostile to other life-forms.

Failure is An Option: An Attempted Memoir, by H. Jon Benjamin

Most people would consider H. Jon Benjamin a comedy show business success. But he’d like to remind everyone that as great as success can be, failure is also an option. And maybe the best option. In this book, he tells stories from his own life, from his early days (“wherein I’m unable to deliver a sizzling fajita”) to his romantic life (“how I failed to quantify a threesome”) to family (“wherein a trip to P.F. Chang’s fractures a family”) to career (“how I failed at launching a kid’s show”).

As Jon himself says, breaking down one’s natural ability to succeed is not an easy task, but also not an insurmountable one. Society as we know it is, sadly, failure averse. But more acceptance of failure, as Jon sees it, will go a long way to making this world a different place . . . a kinder, gentler place, where gardens are overgrown and most people stay home with their pets. A vision of failure, but also a vision of freedom.

With stories, examples of artistic and literary failure, and a powerful can’t-do attitude, Failure Is an Option is the book the world doesn’t need right now but will get regardless.

Conclusion

Thanks to Ariel for coming in to work through this topic with us! Be sure you are subscribed to this podcast to get all the library skills directly to your favorite app each week. And you can check out our shownotes for each episode to get all the info we discussed, along with the links to more resources. Every episode we have created is on our website: cmle.org.

If you want to enjoy our book group podcast, subscribe to Reading With Libraries to get a new book, or a whole new genre, each week.

Thank you listening today for joining us! Check back in with us next week for another library competency – we are looking forward to more chatting about library work.