Professional Development Reflection -- Referencing

NB: As this is my current workplace, I am choosing to anonymize this information. Given my learning journals, it should be easy to tell the place I am referring to.

My workplace held a meeting and tutorial on how to properly answer queries from users about referencing. We had a person come from another of our workplaces to give the lecture. She explained that while we do point users to places where they can find information on referencing, we do not have an established set of referencing, unlike other workplaces in our field. I raised this with the presenter, and she responded that that’s just how our workplace runs.

As an information professional, I found this perplexing. It leaves us as information professionals unable to fully answer a query. For example, if a user needs a certain APA or Harvard reference style, we can’t ascertain which variety of APA or Harvard style to use. The presentation itself was straight forward, and I was glad to learn about a variety of different reference styles, and in a way look ‘behind the veil’ of how referencing worked, especially given my university education relies so heavily upon them for each assignment.

For me, referencing has always been an awkward task and knowing where to look is crucial for success. Specifically we aren’t allowed to help users with referencing in-text, which is understandable given we can only indicate to different reference types and we work without a set standard.

Then again, I guess it’s the same as at the other workplace in our field, who also did not specifically help with in-text referencing, only to put to where their set standard is. When you have so many queries in the day, you cannot focus your time on only one user.

While the meeting was illuminating, I disagreed with the implementation and voiced so. This is healthy in a workplace, and especially a library workplace. To have discussion and difference of opinion is perfectly valid, we are all humans after all, each different and with a unique point of view. I remember when I started my job, my boss always said to let them know if I thought there could be somewhere to change or improve. I’ve done that in most instances that I’ve seen thought we could improve, and as information professionals, change is something that we should always be doing, as information, and the ways in which information is sent back and forth, is constantly in flux.

I appreciate my workplace taking the time to guide us through these presentations when it becomes clear through multiple queries that something needs to be made concrete. We recently had another presentation for the document delivery system, which proved fruitful too (although the document delivery system is still just as daunting for me!).