Library Student Assistant Training

Your duties at the service desk involve deciding which patron questions to take, and which to pass on to a subject librarian.

Directional questions are often easy to distinguish from reference questions. If someone asks you to point them to a certain location in the library or on campus, those are directional questions. Some directional inquiries might be:

• Where are the printers? bathrooms? elevators?

• How do I get to the Divinity Library?

Please answer directional questions. Check with your supervisor or librarian if you do not know the answer.


Reference questions can be trickier to define, and when in doubt whether you should address them or not, always refer them to a librarian. Link to complete list of subject librarians is below.

You are expected to answer only specific types of reference questions. Those are ones when a patron is asking whether the libraries have a specific book, article, film, or database in the collections and knows the specific title. An example of such question:

• How do I find out what books are checked out to my account?

• How do I find out what fines I have on my account?

• Do you have the book Bleak House by Charles Dickens?

• How do I find the full text of an article? (patron can tell you the article title)

• I need to read the book A Heart So White by Javier Marias. Can you help me?

• Do you have a film called Lost in Translation?

Questions about journals tend to be more complicated, even if the patron knows the journal title, so please refer them to a librarian.