Helping the Difficult Library Patron: New Approaches to Examining and Resolving a Long‐Standing and Ongoing Problem

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2003), "Helping the Difficult Library Patron: New Approaches to Examining and Resolving a Long‐Standing and Ongoing Problem", Library Review, Vol. 52 No. 8, pp. 404-405. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530310493824

Users or patrons of libraries can be “difficult” in many ways – disruptive, disobeying the rules, using cell‐phones in the library, monopolizing work‐stations, using the Internet to look for pornography, harassing reference desk staff, vandalizing materials, acting criminally. The impact on library staff can be serious, even to the point of jeopardizing personal safety, and leading some libraries to introduce guards or bouncers. This collection, then, comes at a time when there is growing concern internationally about crime in public places and how employees can best understand and deal with it.

The emphasis of the collection is on practitioner experience, finding solutions, and changing attitudes and building competencies through staff training. It is mainly about US academic libraries, and mainly written by library and information professionals in such places, with nods towards challenges in public libraries and libraries in Europe. In three parts, it defines the difficult patron (ill or angry, adolescent or gay, thief or vandal, homeless or the unattended child), examines the problem patron in the electronic age (Internet access in the library, dealing with technophobes, virtual reference desks and problems with e‐mails and spam), and offers some practical solutions (how other professionals deal with it, why solutions should be found for the sake of both patrons and employees, what kinds of attitudes and skills can be provided in training).

As part of finding solutions, some stereotypes need casting away, effective security procedures need to be introduced, models from other professions should be used (for example, the psychotherapist’s understanding of victims and transference, customer service models from the business world), and awareness and training in conflict and stress and complaint management implemented. Many of the contributors identify these things practically, even though it would be good to see more evidence of whether they are actually working (for example, before and after scenarios). Front‐line staff in libraries, as elsewhere, are in the hot seat with this, and this is a theme towards the end (as it is in Rhea Rubin’s Defusing the Angry Patron, Neal‐Schuman, 2000). Professional interest in the USA is reflected in other works cited by the text – for instance, Beth McNeil and Denise Johnson’s Patron Behavior in Libraries (ALA, 1999) and Mark Willis’s Dealing with Difficult People in the Library (ALA, 1999). A useful slant is provided by Bruce Shuman’s chapter on security, drawing on his book Library Security and Safety Handbook (ALA, 1999).

This is a topical work, then, alerting practitioners and informing students, and it will find its way into professional collections because, despite the price, and unlike many others of its type, coherently focused. The case studies are life‐like, if mostly too uncritical and with insufficient follow‐through except pointers for trainers. The impact on employees gets long overdue attention (for example, getting over outbursts from angry patrons), which is where some of the psychotherapeutic energy could be placed.

There are times in this field, too, where terminology works against solutions: to define “homosexuals” as “difficult” flies in the face of political correctness and suggests that greater subtlety and sensitivity should have been used by the editor and publisher of the book itself, even though, in the wash, the case for finding solutions, and the actual advice provided, is objective enough. There are times too where the jargon of management – such as “conflict management” for gypsies and tramps puts common sense on stilts rather than treating it as inclusive professional behaviour. As with the National Geographic, there are, here, some middle class liberal stereotypes coming out in the discussion of middle class liberal stereotypes. So, ideas here for implementing in practical situations, and reading also for the theoretically inclined, so long as we’re all clear what we mean by “difficult”: some way to go probably before labels turn into really useful definitions.