This also reminds me of the 80/20 rule: you spend 80 percent of your time providing 20 precent of your value and vice versa. If you could determine where what your 80% value contribution is for 20% of the time, imagine how awesome your contributions would be if you could do that for 100% of the time: 400%! It just makes sense to put folks where they can do the most good and let them take off.

I’m looking forward to more conversations with you and Jenny on this!

So, you want to actually get together and writing something?

As someone who spends at least 10 hrs/week at the desk and works with pretty much every discipline at the university, I have to constantly retool my brain with every question. While it can certainly be frustrating at times, it is also one of my favorite parts of my job, because it informs me about what assignments professors are giving as well as the perceptions students have about those assignments. For example, I taught (or re-taught) myself legal research because I kept getting questions from students in a communication law class (one of my liaison areas) at the reference desk. That also opened the door for me to teach research sessions for both sections of that class this spring. Through that experience, I have a much better understanding of the professor’s goals and process for that assignment, and how students approach it, which informs my teaching.

We have to continue to show both students and faculty that we are partners in this process.

But I think there is something to knowing how a discipline (even broadly speaking) works to be able to assist a patron fully. Knowing where those pieces fit together and how is going to raise your comfort level even if you aren’t that engaged in a discipline.

In our gov info session we do a brainstorming activity where we brainstorm how the government organizes and categorizes information (who cares about what), which helps to retrain our brains to think more broadly/creatively about questions. But first you have to have some idea of how the government organizes itself (and to stay away from the tools a bit).