Thing #20: Askaway

I've worked three or four Askaway shifts now, and have gotten a bit more confident about it. The hardest part for me has been signing in! There are two or three levels of sign-in, and at least two windows that need to be open during the Askaway session, and it took me a while to get the hang of it.

The last shift I worked was the busiest-- the questions just kept coming, and we were shortstaffed, and I'd somehow gotten myself out of the chat page that lets librarians staffing the service communicate with each other, so I wasn't sure exactly who else was on or what they were doing, so I kept trying to take all the calls I could.

A lot of the questions I've gotten on Askaway are pretty simple--people want a single reference, or, alternately, they want to know about something so specialized that I know it would take me a long time to dig up even the beginning of the answer, so I refer them to a more specialized resource (like an archive, or a law library). That seems to work fine, and people seem to be happy with the information I can give them.

I think it's hardest on Askaway to do the kind of iterative reference work that I think of as the bread-and-butter of in-person reference service: someone comes in with a vague idea about what they want, you start to show them something but keep talking with them at the same time, and then they talk a bit more and clarify what it is they're looking for-- sometimes it's something they didn't think of mentioning, or sometimes their own needs become more clear as they look at the first resource and realize it's not what they want after all--and then you look together for something else, and then they get more specific, and finally you hit on the thing they really wanted, or at least figure out what it is and how to order it, and everybody's happy.

That kind of reference interview depends so much on in-person give-and-take, tone of voice, body language, back-and-forth conversations; it's hard to reproduce in an online chat environment. But for more straightforward questions, Askaway works pretty well.