User Perspectives on Staff Cooperation During the Reference Transaction

SUMMARY

Discussions of the reference transaction generally assume one staff member and one patron, but this is not always the case in practice. This paper reports on data collected from users' descriptions of public and academic library reference transactions in which more than one staff member played a part. It analyzes users' evaluations of effective and ineffective staff behavior in three aspects of the reference transaction: the initiation of the reference encounter, collaboration between staff members, and serial encounters with more than one staff member. It suggests some ways that guidelines for reference desk behavior might be extended to accommodate multi-staff transactions.

KEYWORDS:

• Reference
• user satisfaction
• cooperation
• collaboration
• evaluation