A Reference for That: Building Better Communities, One Person at a Time

Abstract

Reference librarians, here defined as those people who answer questions for users, play a more profound role within the community than one might think. In the process of responding to users’ questions, the librarian is doing much more than finding an answer to the question that was asked. The librarian is building a relationship with the user that will make the user more likely to ask more questions in the future. The answer to one question often generates more questions later—bringing the user back to the library more often than the user would have guessed at first.