Assessing Reference Staff Competency in the Electronic Environment

Abstract

This paper shows how the Galter Health Sciences Library of Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine developed and implemented a program to assess reference staff competencies for assisting users in the electronic environment after completing a new training program. The first phase was a year-long assessment of reference questions to identify the types of questions received at the desk. Next, a training program for reference was developed and implemented with an emphasis on answering the most common questions identified such as remote access, access privileges, holdings information, and database searching. The program included individualized instruction on library policies, electronic resources, access restrictions, and troubleshooting. The next phase was to create instruments to test staff competencies in answering questions after training. Based on the scores, additional training was individualized and provided to the appropriate staff member to enhance their skills where needed. The training system that was developed has proven to be effective as most staff scored better than 92% on initial testing. As a result, library management can be certain that users' questions are being answered correctly and that the staff has the skills required to work in an electronic environment.

E‐resource helpdesk into virtual reference: identifying core competencies

“…Professional library organizations such as the American Library Association (ALA) ( 2008), the Special Libraries Association, and the Medical Library Association (MLA) ( 2007) have identified and defined groups of major professional and personal skills applicable both to librarianship in general (Jones, 2003) and to more narrowly focused specialties such as reference (American Library Association, n.d.; Digital Reference Education Initiative, 2004; Munson and Walton, 2004), VR (Luo, 2007(Luo, , 2008Tu, 2007), instruction (Botts and Emmons, 2002;Peacock, 2001;Robinson et al, 2005), cataloging (Glasser, 2007;Gregory et al, 2008;Hsieh-Lee, 2008), and acquisitions (Diedrichs, 1998;Fisher, 2001). These skill sets are also referred to as competencies, with competency defined as "a generic knowledge, skill, or attitude of a person that is causally related to effective behavior as demonstrated through external performance criteria" (Griffiths and King, 1986).…”