Promoting Library Reference Services to First-Year Undergraduate Students: What Works?

Karen Sobel

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Most academic libraries have limited budgets for promoting their reference services. Understanding which promotions best reach current and potential patrons is crucial to budgeting funding, as well as time, effectively. This article describes a study that sought to answer three questions: (1) What percentage of first-year undergraduate students are aware of reference services? (2) What percentage of first-years seek information from reference librarians? (3) Through which media are first-years comfortable communicating with reference librarians? To answer these questions, the researcher surveyed 237 first-years during their first semester at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). Awareness varied greatly by media (i.e., in-person, chat, and telephone reference services). Approximately 35 percent of students reported already having used the UNC University Libraries’ reference services. About 69 percent of students preferred face-to-face options over virtual or voice media. Strong trends related to peers’ and educators’ recommendations of reference services also emerged.

Reference and instructional departments at academic libraries often promote their services to undergraduate students through numerous methods. A few popular examples include distributing flyers at freshman orientation, placing links to chat reference services on the library’s home page, and hanging a “Questions?” sign above the reference desk with the hope that students will come. Yet few libraries assess which efforts actually influence those students who choose to use reference services. The purpose of this study is to explore the motivations of first-year students who reported having reference interactions at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). While several other factors, such as professors requiring the use of the reference desk for an assignment, proved more influential, the instruction-session scenario is the most influential factor over which librarians have direct control. Most currently available research evaluates only a single method of promotion. This study measures and compares the effectiveness of all the methods available at a single university’s libraries.

In fall 2006, a 3,816 students began their first year of college at UNC.¹ The reference desk at UNC’s R. B. House Undergraduate Library (generally referred to as the Undergraduate Library), primarily used by the university’s first- and second-year undergraduate students, recorded 10,757 questions received during the 2006–07 school year.² This figure included questions asked through all means available at that library, including face-to-face, instant messenger, and telephone interactions.

In preparation for this study, UNC’s reference librarians identified seven ways their services were promoted:

• Verbal publicity during library instruction sessions
• “Ask-a-Librarian” links on UNC University Libraries’ webpages
• Participation in first-year orientation
• Professors requiring the use of reference services for class assignments
• Recommendations by peers
• Positive experiences using reference desks at other libraries
• Students noticing the reference desk at a UNC library

Why is it important to compare the effectiveness of all these promotional methods? There are two main reasons. First, knowing which methods of promotion truly affect students’ choices to visit the reference desk can help librarians encourage students to visit the desk sooner. More specifically, when librarians understand how to reach out to freshmen, they can encourage more students to use the reference desk throughout their college careers, right from the start. Second, most academic libraries have less funding for promotion than their staff would like. Knowing which methods of promotion best reach new users—an important audience—can help librarians maximize the effect of their promotional dollars.

Background

The latest available figures show nearly seventeen thousand undergraduates (nearly all full-time) and about eleven thousand graduate students enrolled at UNC.³ Undergraduate standards for admission are rigorous, with a 34 percent acceptance rate. Peterson’s Four-Year Colleges 2008 cites an average high school GPA of 4.0 for students admitted as first-year undergraduates at the university.⁴ Moreover, UNC prides itself on promoting diversity. Approximately 22 percent of its students are minorities, and 17 percent of students come from 48 states outside of North Carolina and 111 foreign countries.⁵

Upon entering UNC as undergraduates, students are placed in English composition courses with one of four possibilities. Students may be instructed to take English 100, English 101, English 102, or test out of the English composition requirement completely. Placement is determined by SAT scores, high school advanced placement coursework, and a placement test taken during orientation. The vast majority of UNC’s undergraduate students are placed in English 101. Students who place into English 100 or 101 must take all the subsequent courses in the series.

The English department requires that all teaching assistants bring their English 101 classes to the library for at least one instruction session.⁶ During all sessions, students bring an assignment to work on. Library staff (including librarians and graduate students in the university’s Master of Science in Library Science program) provide instruction on several relevant library resources, then provide assistance during guided work time.

Literature Review

Although the question of how first-year college students choose whether to use reference services sounds simple, it actually involves many complex factors. For instance, in the case of students, the factors may include their previous experience with libraries and librarians, their academic courses and goals, and their levels of library-related anxiety. For librarians, this question involves subtleties of their personal interactions with students, their drive to learn and use new technologies, and endless time and patience. For an academic library as an organization, factors involve ties between the library and various academic departments, funding for staff and training, and the range of images that the university projects. The following literature provides background on these complex, interlocking elements.

Familiarity with the concept of library anxiety helps librarians better understand students’ reasons for using or not using reference services. Sharon L. Bostick’s Library Anxiety Scale has become a standard for the quantification and discussion of anxiety and discomfort among library patrons.⁷ Along with colleagues Anthony J. Ongwuegbuzie and Qun G. Jiao, Bostick has further explored library anxiety through personality theories designed by psychologists. One of the aspects of their research most relevant to this study is the concept of state anxiety versus trait anxiety.⁸ In very basic terms, state anxiety is anxiety resulting from the situation a person is currently in. Trait anxiety is a tendency to feel anxious in many, varied situations.⁹

Another relevant piece of Bostick’s work with the Library Anxiety Scale is her list of five dimensions of library anxiety. The dimensions are “barriers with staff, affective barriers, comfort with the library, knowledge of the library, and mechanical barriers.”¹⁰ The first two factors relate most strongly to the questions involved in this study.

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