This month’s post is an interview with a reference librarian at a private university’s law school. I am always looking for more perspectives and would love to interview you if you are interested. Please get in touch via https://www.libraryaccessibility.net/submit.
Q: Could you tell me a little bit about your library? Who it serves, the role it plays in the school, and so forth?
A: I work at the law library of a private university. Our primary patrons are students and faculty. We also serve the local bar (attorneys), and are open to the public, though we don’t welcome them. Our library provides a place for students to study, together in study rooms or alone at their study carrels. We have a reasonably sized collection. We get one textbook for each class, or two copies for the largest classes.
Q: What are the biggest accessibility challenges you think your library has?
A: Some members of the public who find their way into the library appear to be mentally ill or intoxicated, and we have had no training on how to deal with them.
The library’s aisles between shelves aren’t wide enough for a wheelchair. We haven’t had a patron in a wheelchair trying to use the shelves. If it comes up, we can pull books, but we can’t offer the patron shelf-browsing.
We’ve had a couple of public patrons bring untrained dogs in and claim they were “service” dogs. As you know, we can only ask what the dog is trained to do. Fortunately the ADA guidelines allow us to tell owners to take their dogs out if the dog is disruptive, and both of these dogs were (one barked repeatedly, the other jumped on people).
Also, the photocopiers/scanners would be very hard for someone in a wheelchair to operate. If the issue arose, we’d have to scan or copy the materials for the patron.
Q: As a public librarian, I definitely see lots of patrons who are mentally ill and/or intoxicated. Training would certainly help, but in my experience what helps a lot more is having clear policies in place about what behaviors are and are not acceptable in the library. To some extent, you can learn how to communicate effectively with people who are mentally ill, but if you don’t know WHAT to communicate to them, it doesn’t do you all that much good. Do you think the staff at your library is on the same page about what to expect of these patrons and where to draw the line on how much help to give them, when you need to ask them to leave, etc.?
A: Our staff is down to four people, one of whom avoids interacting with the public as much as possible. She fears conflict and would not be capable of asking someone to leave. Also, I think two of us would give a non-student, non-lawyer patron more help than the library director would. So no, we’re not on the same page.
Q: Ugh, that sounds like a problem for many reasons. You also mentioned the aisles not being wheelchair-accessible. I’ve looked this up before and been told that a staff member pulling requested items is considered a reasonable substitute for physical access to the stacks under the Americans with Disabilities Act. This is a good example of the fact that you can’t just rely on being ADA-compliant when you are evaluating your physical space for accessibility. The standards aren’t as high as we often imagine them to be. Do you know if your library has considered moving the shelving to make the aisles wider?
A: No, there has been no discussion of this except for my bringing it up at a staff meeting once.
Q: Ah, yes. This is a favorite way of ‘addressing’ problems at multiple libraries where I’ve worked. On a more positive note, what are some strategies you use to make your library more accessible/what are some things you think your library does well in terms of accessibility?
A: Fortunately, students with disabilities get help from the university, so we get very few requests for accessibility accommodations. We do let students with physical disabilities exit from the back door, which is closer to the parking set aside for them.
Q: How do you determine who that is as far as who uses the back exit? Do students need to be on some kind of list, or do you just make it known that if you need to go straight to the parking area because you have a disability, this is where you go?
A: This accommodation has been on an ad hoc basis. In some cases, the students have requested it; in others, we have offered it to students with mobility problems.
Something [else] we do well is hire good, friendly students to work the circulation desk, and one of my coworkers trains them to greet people as they enter the library. They help students figure out how to scan and copy items.
Q: As a public librarian, I sometimes feel envious of academic and K-12 librarians, because in theory you all have more access to information about your patrons that could help with accessibility issues and, theoretically, allies within your institution. For example, K-12 students with disabilities have Individual Education Plans, and most universities have some kind of Office of Disability. In practice, does your library have any kind of relationship with the parts of the school that have that information and expertise? Is it actually shared?
A: Our students get help directly from the disability office, but the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) restricts what information can be shared about students, and like most schools, our administration is probably over-cautious in sharing information.
We had an unusual situation last fall where the school admitted a student who appeared to have learning and memory problems. Almost everyone who worked at the library ended up helping the student repeatedly in the computer labs. The student had a lot of trouble remembering various passwords to our computer network, various databases, and our online classroom platforms. I advocated for us to set aside a computer in the lab that would be usable only by this student, so that we could save all the passwords. I think this would have helped the student (and us) a lot. But the disability office said the request for the accommodation had to come from the student (and the form for the request was online). Since we weren’t allowed to know that the student had a disability, we weren’t allowed to suggest that accommodation. The student ended up withdrawing from the school (which would have happened with or without accommodations, but we ended up spending a lot of time in the lab, away from the service desks, before it happened).
Q: I'm really sorry to hear that! What a frustrating situation, and a frankly depressing response from the people who were supposed to help that student! Do you know if it would have been possible for the library to go ahead and set aside that computer without involving the disability office, or would that have violated some kind of policy?
A: I talked to someone in the IT department about just doing it, but he said he wouldn’t do it unless the disability office signed off on it.
Q: Sigh….Well, moving on. Something we often forget about disability/ability is that those are porous categories that people move between over time, and in particular that many people spend the first, say, ¾ of their lives as abled, and then become disabled in some way as they get older. Those people don’t necessarily have the same coping and self-advocacy skills that someone who grows up with a disability often learns, and might not have much self-awareness about their disability, either. I know you work with a lot of faculty members who are older and who might be experiencing that sort of thing. Do you have any advice about working with those patrons?
A: We work with a lot of elderly professors, and some older attorneys who come in. It takes a lot of patience. Law professors have very high self-esteem and feel uncomfortable when they don’t know how to do something. Their self-advocacy skills are just fine, thank you very much, but they have persistent problems with technology.
My advice is: a.) tell them the system or database is confusing and that everyone has problems with it; b.) refer to the challenge in question as “techie stuff” or “hoops to jump through” and c.) try to get systems set up so that they don’t have to do very much. I also like to get my hands on their computer rather than try to tell them what to do with it. As for giving support by phone, it’s nearly impossible. I will go to their offices even if they resist and want their problem fixed over the phone.
I had a retired professor ask for help with a database password. He had forgotten it, so I was walking him through changing it using his security question. The question was “what town were you born in?” And he had entered that name incorrectly at some point, so even when I entered it correctly, it didn’t work. I learned that this particular vendor couldn’t see the answer -- I called and tried to get them to see his attempt was “close enough” so he could get in. We couldn’t just set up a new account because the vendor permitted only one account for an email address. Eventually I talked the vendor into blowing away his old account and starting from scratch, but that was frustrating. While I was talking to the vendor, the professor kept talking to me about unrelated things.
Q: This is helpful! It has some good examples of adjusting your level of service based on the patron’s needs. Contacting a vendor for a patron’s individual account sounds really time-consuming. However, I know that academic librarians often support faculty to an extent that is surprising to public librarians like me. I also thought you made a good point that dealing with someone who doesn’t understand their own limitations can be especially frustrating. “Be patient” and “have empathy” are of course good advice, but they are much easier to say than to do, especially with patrons who (it sounds like) don’t have much of an appreciation for or understanding of what you are doing to help them. Is there anything you have found that helps you stick with that advice even when you are frustrated?
A: In the midst of these frustrating interactions, I promise myself that I will vent my frustration to a coworker or friend. Sometimes I also see the funny or absurd side of it (for example, the professor who initially misspelled his security answer (thereby locking in a wrong answer), even though it was the name of the town where he was born). I think it’s also helpful to be older; I’ve learned to let little things go more easily than I used to.