










































Extending Roaming (or Roving) Reference Service into the Classroom


60  ATLA 2023 PROCEEDINGS

Extending Roaming (or Roving) 
Reference Service into the 
Classroom
Ed Hughes, Director of Library Services, Memphis Theological Seminary

ABSTRACT Students prefer in-person communication but, in the past de-
cade, librarians are seeing fewer students in the library. Finding ways to 
reconnect with students has been a challenge. Here, I suggest that we go 
into the classroom as auditing students to build relationships with students.  

This paper is about extending roaming (or roving) reference service 
into the classroom. The essence of the idea is to audit seminary class-
es as a way of meeting and interacting with students and faculty. In 
recent years, academic librarians have been trying various strategies 
for reaching out to students. As near as I can determine, becoming a 
student along with other students has not been a systematic strategy 
used by academic librarians.

This program resembles similar efforts that have been made by 
academic librarians generally known as “personal librarian” pro-
grams. Among these efforts have been programs involving “em-
bedded personal librarians.” All of these programs rely on a close 
working relationship with the instructor (Meals 2022, 1). What I am 
proposing is developing a close relationship with students by be-
coming a student.

Having the library staff audit classes is part of our revisioning of 
library services that includes some of the concepts from the Chroni-
cle of Higher Education’s publication The Library of the Future: How 
the Heart of the Campus is Transforming (Carlson 2022). I wish I could 
say that this was a planned effort, but the events that triggered this 
move were mostly outside the Seminary’s control.

One long-term event was the declining use of the physical space in 
the library and its print collection. Usage crashed between 2010 and 
2012. As we purchased more digital resources, students visited the 
library less. A more recent event was the COVID-19 pandemic during 



PAPERS  61

which we tried to maintain viable library services, which I will discuss 
later. A third event was reduced library staff, in part due to budgetary 
constraints and in part due to pandemic-triggered workforce drop-
outs. We went from 5 FTEs to 1.5 FTEs. Even if we could have stayed 
open during the pandemic, our open hours would have shrunk.

Once we were in the depths of the pandemic, we had only emails 
and occasional phone calls for interacting with students or faculty. 
Our first steps were twofold: we initiated a controlled digital lending 
program using two new scanners. With just two people to respond to 
students, we seemed to be scanning all the time. Our peak was dur-
ing 2022 with 192 scans.

We also purchased any eBook a student wanted, included re-
quired and recommended readings for the course, and using the 
seminary library that was donated to the Internet Archive.

Even after the pandemic, very few students returned to the library. 
This was in part due to our success in meeting student demands dur-
ing the pandemic, but it also led me to believe that our print book col-
lection was of marginal value. If that was true, I wondered why we 
continued to pay so much for our Integrated Library System.

The price never went down in all the years we owned that ILS, but 
cost per circulation increased as the number of checkouts declined 
year after year. When we first bought the system, we were paying 
about $2.60 per checkout plus labor costs. By the time I discontinued 
that ILS, it was costing us nearly $23.00 per checkout plus labor costs.

Consequently, I looked for the least expensive system to replace it. 
In the end, the cost savings were large, at least for our library. With 
the savings and on advice from our Dean, we purchased the Digital 
Theological Library (DTL). The Digital Theological Library fills most 
of the gaps that were in our digital collection and allowed us to go 
to closed stacks. 

This still left the problem of helping students directly and most 
virtual services never seemed satisfactory. As Tara Mawhinney not-
ed in her 2020 study of virtual communications with students and 
faculty, “Participants expressed a preference for modes of commu-
nication that are personal, informal, perceived as safe and secure 
and conversational” (Mawhinney 2020, 1).

With students no longer coming to the library, I thought I might 
try going to them. To develop some rapport with students, I began 
auditing one class per semester via Zoom. This was made easier be-
cause the Seminary moved all classes to online during the pandemic. 



62  ATLA 2023 PROCEEDINGS

I continued auditing classes after the pandemic. I also began hosting 
one-hour Zoom sessions, two at the beginning of the semester and 
two at the end. Students needing additional meetings got them at 
times convenient for them.

My status as an auditing student was for the purpose of establish-
ing a personal connection with our students, their assignments, and 
the faculty.  It does not mean that I can offer in-class help to students 
or faculty. However, I am occasionally asked in class about the avail-
ability of resources by the professor or students.

To begin auditing a class, I ask permission of the professor. Of the 
six classes I asked to audit, no one said I could not. My goal is to audit 
most of the classes offered at Memphis Theological Seminary with 
advice from our Dean. Once I am in a class, I am usually introduced 
as the library director at the beginning of the course. Most of my in-
teraction with students develop outside the classroom but may not 
have happened had I not audited the course. What I think happens is 
that students know me from three sources: a class I am currently au-
diting that they are also in; a class we were in previously; or a student 
who knows me tells another student. This last process happens more 
often than I thought it would. Sometimes it is the faculty who tells 
the student that they should contact me about their research needs. 

In all my classes, I am allowed and even encourage to submit assign-
ments including reflection papers on the readings. Occasionally, when 
reading other student reflection papers, I sometimes mention that they 
might consider looking at a library resource that they had not used. 

 It is not just the interactions between people that has improved 
our ability to respond to student needs. When auditing a class, I get 
information that I would not normally get. There are three worth men-
tioning here. First, nearly every professor has favorite titles that are 
not part of the syllabus but, when they are mentioned in class, I make 
sure we own them. With money I saved on cancelling our ILS, I have 
a good ebook budget and can buy even expensive ebooks. Second, as-
signments become less mysterious, at least in the classes I have audit-
ed. If you have had years of working with a professor’s assignments, 
this is not a problem but if you are relatively new in the job, as I was, 
or if the professor is new, auditing a class is a good way learning what 
these assignments are. Third, in my emails directed to “all students,” I 
address them as “Fellow Students.” I think it makes me less frightening. 

My contacts with students outside the classroom mostly consist 
of emails and Zoom sessions. Emails show up at nearly every hour. 



PAPERS  63

In the last two years, only 2:00 AM showed no emails.  I am not using 
any chat service because I think they are misleading. If a real person 
cannot answer a chat at one in the morning, then it is not twenty-four-
seven. We cannot answer a 1:00 AM query (although my colleague 
once did). Instead, we tell students that a real person will respond 
via email between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 
Sundays from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. Technically, we do not have enough 
staff hours to cover these hours. We have 1.5 FTEs, or 60 hours per 
week, to cover 80 hours. However, because I am an exempt employee, 
I can cover more than 40 hours. Given our thin staffing levels, our 
response time is not as quick as it could be if we had more eyes moni-
toring emails. Depending on the circumstances, our turnaround time 
can be as high as two hours. This is an improvement over our earli-
est efforts during the pandemic which frequently went to 12 hours.

Working at this more personal level, I discovered that most stu-
dents have a personal rather than professional style of communi-
cation that can be used by the librarian to engage students. Some 
students were surprisingly unfamiliar with free Microsoft accounts 
and managing citations with either Microsoft Word or Google Docs.

As noted earlier, we rely heavily on digital resources. My goal has 
been to make every acquisition digital. This is almost, but not quite, 
possible. Thus far this fiscal year, we had to buy five books that were 
only available in paper.

Looking to the future, I see more reasons to pursue the establish-
ment of personal connections with students. For instance, we may 
be able to dispel the growing fear of AI technology by showing how 
it can be used responsibly. 

REFERENCES

Carlson, Scott, and Chronicle of Higher Education, Inc. 2022. 
The Library of the Future: How the Heart of the Campus is 
Transforming. Washington, DC: Chronicle of Higher Education.

Mawhinney, Tara. 2020. “User preferences related to virtual 
reference services in an academic library.” The Journal 
of Academic Librarianship 46, no. 1 (January). https://doi.
org/10.1016/j.acalib.2019.102094.

Meals, Catherine. 2022. “Evaluating the Impact of Personal 
Librarians on Academic and Affective Outcomes.” College & 
Research Libraries 83, no. 1 (January): 25-44. https://crl.acrl.
org/index.php/crl/article/view/25263.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2019.102094
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2019.102094
https://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/article/view/25263
https://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/article/view/25263

