Walking in to work this morning, musing on staffing and service models for liaison librarians and fumbling for my keys with mitten-encased hands, I decided that our liaison model is doing just about precisely half of what it could do (time, money, and staffing aside). Currently, there is a liaison for each major on campus. Freshmen and Sophomores are encouraged to meet with the liaisons as well, but before they declare a major they may have to figure out new people for every class they take.

Now I’m not saying that it’s bad for students to go to the person most suited to answer their questions. Far from it. But I remember being too intimidated to figure out who the people were who could answer my basic questions when I was a pre-major, let alone re-figure for each class.

But what if each freshman were assigned a librarian at the same time that they’re assigned a faculty adviser. This librarian could be “their” librarian who could do anything from answer basic questions to directing them (and personally introducing them) to the liaison most suited to answer specific questions.

Here’s the major hitch in my plan: 500 freshmen… 7 librarians… Not a good ratio, especially if any of them still needed their personal library adviser by the time they got to sophomore year. We could end up with as many as 1000 students per librarian, plus our students who have already declared majors.

Of course, many students wouldn’t sit down with us more than once (and they’d only come that once if we required it). So it might not be that much more work. And it might be a nice way to personalize the library.

I just don’t know. It was an interesting thought, if nothing else.

We talk a lot about personalization, and about how personalization improves the user’s experiences, and about how personalization makes the user feel appreciated. Well, I’ve just found out that you can take personalization too far. My dad got a birthday card from the dealer that sold him his car several years ago. This is freaky.

It’s funny because we give dealers all sorts of information about ourselves when we apply for loans, but there’s a level of politeness which assumes that the dealer will a) only use the information for the purpose we intended when we handed over that information, and b) pretend not to know the information when they’re in situations outside of that originally intended information exchange.

I remember learning this lesson when working at a small, independent bookstore for several years. We were expected to watch what our regulars bought so that we could recommend books to them that they would like, but we had to pretend not to know that one regular was reading up on divorce after having spent a year or so buying “fix my relationship” books. And we were certainly never to know why that same person later bought the books on managing finances after divorce…

We also collected phone numbers of the customers who signed up for our charity program (buy a book and 1% of the sale goes to a charity of your choice). But we weren’t supposed to “know” their phone numbers even when, after years of ringing up purchases and entering the phone number which served as their account numbers, we could rattle off the names and numbers of several dozen of our regular customers.

There is decency in asking our patrons to provide us directly with information we use for their accounts, or let them know what information we collect about them. But I think there is even greater decency in “forgetting” even readily remembered personal information when we’re interacting with our patrons in contexts outside of the personalized services we provide.

tags: privacy, personalization, libraries