Reference Coordinator MCPHS University Boston, Massachusetts
Disclosure: I do not have any relevant financial / non-financial relationships with any proprietary interests.
Background: Reference librarians at a small private university have been regularly offering individual research consultations for students, but these personalized meetings were never categorized or assessed as a separate type of service. With expanding the number of online programs and to better meet students’ information needs, in October 2019 the library has implemented an online Research Consultation request form for scheduling consultations with the librarians. At that time, students could request in-person, phone or online session. During the pandemic, the demand for virtual Zoom consultations has significantly increased, making it essential for librarians to provide effective scheduling and correct statistical data.
Description: The Research Consultations dataset was added to the Springshare LibAnswers, which serves as an online platform for collecting all types of reference transactions. Nevertheless, quantitative analysis completed by the end of the year showed that statistical data did not reflect the correct number of consultations: some librarians entered the sessions as regular reference questions in the Reference Analytics dataset; others categorized them under Instruction in the separate Access database. To eliminate these discrepancies, a concise table highlighting the differences between the three types of library services (Reference, Research Consultations and Instruction) was compiled and approved by the Library to ensure that the staff defines each reference transaction correctly, and statistics is consistent with the number of provided sessions. In addition to this table, the poster will highlight methods used to schedule consultations, important trends identified, and the library future goals.
Conclusion: Research consultations remain an important but often overlooked part of reference services offered by academic libraries. Students appreciate an opportunity to meet with a subject librarian face-to-face and get individualized assistance with finding information for their assignments or research. This type of information literacy instruction can be especially effective in helping students to define a research topic, improve literature search strategy, and identify the best resources. Such online software as Zoom allows students to watch librarians utilize online resources in real time and helps them to master the best practices of literature searching and evaluation.
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