PLA Blog

The last of my “tour” of ALA discussion groups was the Reference Performance discussion group. Here’s a snapshot of some of the issues and questions that were brought up at the group. Feel free to comment on these!!

• What ARE the expectations of a librarian? The group agreed that it’s not enough to only be good at “reference”–it goes further than that. Even in an academic setting, librarians can no longer be strong in only one arena of librarianship.
• Librarians should take leadership roles within the school/community they serve. In turn, this makes the library’s role (as well as the librarian’s role) in the community more visible and potentially viewed as valuable.
• What is a “bar” for librarians to meet or exceed? Should there be such a thing? This brought about some lively discussion.
• Attitude–can it be quantified? Does it have to be? Attitude was mentioned as a way of evaluating librarians.
• What are ways in which librarians can be evaluated? Peer, “secret shoppers”, supervisor only, written evaluations, self-evaluations were all mentioned as possibilities.
• We discussed a couple ways to get buy-in on new technological advances: Use early-adopters of technology to be the prophet to the rest of a (jaded?) staff; put nay-sayers on committees with early-adopters.
• How do paraprofessionals come into play? What is the break-point between what a para can answer vs. what a professional can answer? This is an age-old question that still has some librarians disagreeing.
• Is mandatory involvement the way to go, in terms of getting staff to contribute to new technologies, new ideas, etc.?

Tags: evaluations, librarians, paraprofessionals, performance, reference

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 at 12:05 pm and is filed under PLA Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.