The Tech-NO Patrons
This morning I just took a call from a nurse who needed information on congestive heart failure for a paper she plans to write this weekend for her class. She is a night shift nurse and won't be able to make it in to pick up the information until late at night. (I usually will stay late to help patrons, but even this librarian needs to sleep.) Originally she asked if Thursday night would be too soon to get the information. Ninety nine percent of the time I have search results back to patrons within 12-24 hours, so Thursday night wasn't going to be a problem. What sent alarm bells off in my head is that if she got the search results on Thursday night that leaves her precious little time to retrieve the necessary articles from her citation list (especially if we had to get them from ILL). I mentioned to her that I could save her a lot of time and energy by emailing the search results to her. She could then email me back what articles she needed. Those I could get online I would email back to her and those I couldn't I would copy and have ready to pick up one evening this week. Easy right? Wrong. She responded that she didn't use email, she didn't have an email account and didn't even know what her email address would be at work. So it would be just easier for her if she picked up the information in the evening.
Ok now that makes time even more of an issue. I explained to her that I can print of the citations to articles and have them in a pick up box outside my office tonight, but she will have to go through the results and then determine what articles she wants. Based on the print out she will know whether we own the article in the library or if it is available online. I also explained that if the article was not owned by us we would have to get it from the outside and that could take anywhere from 2-7 days.
As it turns out, a majority of the articles I retrieved were not available in print in our library but they were available to our library online. Given the fact that she was so technophobic about email, how good are her chances that she is going to know how to get the online journal article? Even my best and most savvy users can get tripped up finding some online journal articles. How is this patron going to know to get the online article she has to use a hospital computer to go to the library's intranet page (unavoidably buried on the hospital's intranet site) which directs her to the online journals link? Or is she just going to hop on to Google and hope for the best?
Usually, I sit down with patrons at the computer to show them how to get online journal articles. It is not rocket science but the procedure is not always intuitive and can be frustrating for those not familiar with technology or the quirks of electronic journals. However, I can't do this for this patron. So I ended up writing a detailed instruction sheet on how she could access the online articles from the list of citations. Yet I still worry that she might not get the information she needs.
What else could I have done? We are in the process of getting a link resolver to better organize our electronic journal access and provide direct links to full text articles within our databases. But, a link resolver doesn't help in this situation since she didn't want an email of her search. In our quest to provide the best service through technology, there are patrons who just don't even use the basics that we have come to regard as common place, such as email. How to we reach them and get them the information they need when they are (intentionally or unintentionally) leaving themselves behind the technology curve? By utilizing library and web technology are we participating in a sort of information Darwinism? If so what is our obligation to help prevent those users from being naturally selected out of the information revolution?
3 Comments:
This is something I struggle with as well.
Are we doing the patron a favor by helping her out on short notice? Or by doing the search and retrieval for her, am I short-changing her chance to learn how electronic
resources work?
I always tell those who come in to learn that although a bit difficult at first, the huge influx of information is something that is here to stay and that by learning how to navigate it, they are doing themselves a big favor in the long run.
I find I all too often make my choice by my current workload, not necessarily what is best for the patron.
Not a criticism at all, but something that I worry about almost daily, so it is interesting to see what others think/do.
I am so glad you posted this! I am a medical librarian and I do a bit of outreach to nurses. Last week I taught an intoductory class on CINAHL and Medline and by the end of the class, all the students had glazed expressions on their faces. I want to show them how to use our resources and how it can make their work a bit easier but with the technology divide, how can it be accomplished?
Hopefully someone has found a great way to do this.
Well-put, Tech-NO patrons! This is an interesting/frustrating discussion I have with my mom (a psychotherapist and self-proclaimed Luddite). She works for a hospital system that I know will sooner or later go to an EMR system. She refuses to use e-mail nor does she have any desire to learn how to use the internet. (I don't what will happen for her professionally if they require her to use a computerized system.)
She calls from time to time to complain that the university librarians are rude and ill-tempered. I imagine they may have become exasperated at her stubborn refusal to learn how to retrieve articles she needs. From my point of view, I can see how it can be trying when attempting to help someone that refuses to learn (esp. when her outlook is that technology=downfall of a civilized society).
I'm a hospital librarian and am always happy to spend time w/ people who need help navigating our resources and learning searching skills. I'm also willing to get articles for those who are not so sure-footed around the Web. Although, I'm careful not to do anyone's work for them (esp. when it comes to school projects) as there have been some classes that require that the students show their search results and how they found their citations.
As for my mom, I've stopped trying to convince her of anything and hopefully over time, she'll give in. (But I doubt it, stubbornness runs in the family!)
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