Behind the Scenes: Working Online Reference

So, one of the things I get to do this semester is working with Dave, one of the reference librarians. He works with answering the reference questions sent in by e-mail. Things have been pretty slow for him lately, but today I was able to help out with answering a question. To give you an idea of what it's like, I'm going to walk you through what we did.

1) Search the Lilly website
Apparently, many people discover that the Lilly might have something useful to them by doing a search on the internet. So, we search the Lilly website for what they want information about (in this case, a specific person). We found the name in question in the Latin American mss. page, though it had no useful context.

2) Browse the card catalog
Now that we knew our information was in one of the manuscript collections, we turned to the manuscript index in the reading room card catalog. I looked the person up by last name and found two cards for him: one listing correspondence he wrote and the other saying who to look up to find correspondence to him. So, we pulled the card listing what he wrote, and then we pulled the second card with the letter to him. We then photocopied the cards, so we didn't have to re-write out the information, before replacing them in the catalog.

3) Hit the stacks
We took our photocopies of the cards down to the manuscript stacks to find the physical letters. I got to find the boxes in the appropriate collection (Latin American mss. - Peru). For each item, we had to fill out a pink (a pink slip used for calling up manuscript items) to put in the box to mark its place. Keeping manuscript and archival items in order, whether it's an order imposed by the institution or kept from the original donor, is extremely important. Not only can it help you find materials, but if it is the order from the donor, it can provide some insight into the person who created the collection. The letters we pulled went into new folders, labeled with their collection and other pertinent information, before going into another box for the trip upstairs. We also checked each item off of our photocopy of the catalog cards to make sure we'd found all of the items.

4) Respond to the patron
The first thing I was told about communication with patrons is to be polite. First of all, it is common courtesy. Second, we are representing a prestigious institution, and we would like to be able to maintain the Lilly's good reputation. The second thing I learned was to lay out our process as clearly as possible, so that another reference librarian reading our response would be able to easily find what we did without having to go through it all again. We included in the e-mail the exact descriptions of the materials listed on the cards, and described our photocopying policy and prices, as well as telling the patron what the current wait for processing copying requests is. We're supposed to put as much information as possible (as unambiguously as possible) in the first e-mail to save extra correspondence.

5) Wait for a response
Not all patrons follow up on their reference questions. We like to keep things in order, however, so we are prepared if they do respond. We printed out the response e-mail, stapled it to the photocopy of the catalog cards, and placed it on a holding shelf on top of the box with the materials. We also wrote the date on the e-mail and that we were waiting for information on whether to photocopy the documents.

It was a fun experience, particularly pulling materials from the stacks. The e-mail was signed with my name, which felt all nice and professional, and I'm looking forward to getting to do more reference work over the course of the semester.