dec06b.indd


Julie Arendt and Mary K. Taylor 

When
the
walls
crash
down


Offer
services
where
the
students
are



The incident 
It started like any other Monday at Southern 
Illinois University Carbondale’s Morris Library. 
It was late in the semester. Students were 
busy at the library computers, working on 
homework or just surfing the Web. A couple 
of librarians were at the information desk. 
The fi rst floor and the basement of the library 
were open and in use, but the other six fl oors 
of the building were closed. Occasionally, it 
felt like the library building was shaking, as 
construction equipment rumbled overhead on 
the upper floors. The library was in the thick 
of a multi­year construction and renovation 
project. It had taken months and months of 
planning. The contractor was hired and work 
was fi nally underway. 

The library staff was beginning to get used 
to the nearly continuous rumbling and shak­
ing. Equipment punched holes in the exterior 
walls to remove the brick facade. Suddenly 
there was a huge crash, much louder than any 
previous rumbling, and then all noise stopped. 
Something was not right. A huge section of 
bricks had unexpectedly fallen off one side of 
two upper floors of the building and had sliced 
like a knife into the roof of the third fl oor. 

Fortunately, no one was injured by the 
plummeting bricks. Until it was certain that 
more bricks would not fly off the building, the 
library was off limits. Everyone in the library 
had to evacuate. Anything inside the library 
building became inaccessible. 

The loss of the main library building was 
not as devastating as it could have been. The 
library had switched to electronic delivery 
for many of its journals, and the servers for 
those resources were in another building. 

To prepare for the construction project, the 
library had moved more than 80 percent of 
the collection to off­site storage. Two thirds 
of the library staff members were in offi ces 
in other buildings. Nevertheless, important 
parts of the collection were unreachable. We 
temporarily lost our print reserves collection, 
our newer print journals and books, and our 
print reference collection. We could not access 
any of the books from storage and interlibrary 
loan that were being held at the circulation 
desk for patrons. We also lost access to the 
Map Library, the Curriculum Materials Center, 
special format materials, and the preservation 
department offi ces. 

The response 
The library administration rushed to mitigate 
the problems. They had plenty of concerns, 
including building safety, public relations, 
and alternate work for displaced employees. 
Working with the campus administration and 
information technology administrators, they 
found a location to continue to offer library 
services near the center of campus at the help 
desk of a computer lab. 

The circulation department squeezed as 
many book trucks as they could into the small 
space, so patrons could pick up materials 
delivered from off­site storage and interlibrary 
loan, as well as return materials. Reference 
and circulation staff shared the same desk 

Julie Arendt is reference librarian-sciences, e-mail: 
jarendt@lib.siu.edu, and Mary K. Taylor is medical and 
distance learning librarian, e-mail: mtaylor@lib.siu.edu, 
at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale 
© 2006 Julie Arendt and Mary K. Taylor 

C&RL News December 2006  698 

mailto:mtaylor@lib.siu.edu
mailto:jarendt@lib.siu.edu


and computer. The student newspaper and 
campus staff newsletter ran stories about the 
temporary location, and liaison librarians 
notified their departments. 

The librarian in charge of the chat reference 
service requested that we extend chat refer­
ence hours. She did not create a formal sched­
ule, but the extended hours just happened. 
Reference staff logged on early and stayed on 
late to be there for people’s questions. 

During the first day following the con­
struction incident, chat reference got a surge 
of questions. After that, it slowed down. 
Library staffers were there to answer ques­
tions, but the questions were not coming. 
The library did not get many reference ques­
tions at the service desk in the computer lab 
either. People were coming to the makeshift 
library to pick up and return books or to ask 
when the library would reopen, but for the 
most part, people were not coming there for 
research assistance. 

Taking service to the students 
One evening, two reference librarians chatted 
about this silence in online reference. They 
both felt like there was something more that 
they should be doing to provide service while 
the building was closed. The computer lab 
was not drawing much traffic, and neither was 
online reference. Where else could the library 
go, and what else could the library do? 

After this chat, one of the librarians e­
mailed her boss with the suggestion that the 
library take a laptop and offer roaming refer­
ence services in places where the students 
study. On Friday morning, the associate dean, 
already swamped with problems related to 
the construction incident, responded with an 
e­mail to all the reference librarians saying 
that it was a great idea and that anyone who 
was willing to coordinate it was welcome 
to do so. By Friday afternoon, no one had 
volunteered to be the coordinator. 

That afternoon, the authors of this paper 
talked about the lack of volunteers, and 
quickly we became the volunteers. We came 
up with a short list of necessary materials: a 
laptop with a wireless Internet connection, 

library bookmarks, scrap paper, pens, signs, 
and nametags. One of us asked a student 
worker where students ordinarily studied, and 
based on her recommendation, we decided to 
offer roaming reference at the student center. 
One librarian volunteered to go there the 
following Monday and Tuesday evening, and 
the other volunteered to go on Wednesday 
and Thursday evening. We borrowed a laptop 
from the instructional support services depart­
ment of the library. While we were requesting 
the laptop, we bumped into the manager of 
instructional support services and told him 
about our plan. He thought it was a great 
idea and allowed us to “jump the line” for 
graphics work. This assistance gave us pro­
fessional­looking signs by Monday evening, 
instead of the normal two­week production 
time. We sent an e­mail to the student center 
to let them know that we would be there, 
and we sent an e­mail to the other librarians 
to seek volunteers to take daytime shifts at 
the student center in addition to their shifts 
at the computer lab. Within an hour or two, 
we had planned off­site reference and put the 
pieces in place to make it happen. 

A few of the plans changed during the 
next week. Librarians volunteered to work 
at the student center, so we expanded our 
planned service hours. On Monday morning, 
the student center e­mailed back that they 
would prefer us to take a table rather than 
to roam. They offered to provide a table and 
to post signs about the service near all of the 
building’s entrances. The library administra­
tive office supplied us with an offi cial library 
tablecloth to cover the table. By Monday 
night, we were ready to go. 

When we fi rst went to the student center, 
we did not know what to expect. Would we 
spend hours on end doing nothing? If we 
could help just one person, it would be better 
than nothing, but would it be worth the effort? 
On the first night, our concerns were allayed. 
The table, in a prime location in the middle 
of the fi rst floor of the student center, was 
certainly busier than the desk at the computer 
lab, and it was at least as busy as the refer­
ence desk of the library had been. Of course, 

December 2006  699 C&RL News 



a few people stopped to complain about the 
inconvenience of the library closure. A num­
ber of questions were for basic information 
about what had happened to the library and 
when it would reopen. Some of the questions 
were the informational questions that ordinar­
ily were asked at the library reference desk. 
With the laptop, we were able to respond. 
For example, one librarian helped a group 
of students who were working in the coffee 
shop on a sociology paper. As the week 
progressed, we added more service hours 
as librarians saw that service at the student 
center was not a waste of time. 

The lessons 
The library reopened on the second Saturday 
after the construction incident. Reference ser­
vice at the student center was over, and it had 
been a success. We do not plan to have the 
walls of the library crash down again, but we 
take away some lessons from the experience 
to help us in our day­to­day work. 

1) Levera ge infor mal conver sations. 
The idea to offer reference services in the 
student center did not come from a formal 
crisis management meeting; it came from a 
“water cooler” conversation between librar­
ians. The decision of where to offer the 
service did not come from a formal survey 
of different possible locations on campus, it 
came from passing a student worker in the 
hall. These conversations by themselves could 
have stayed just conversations, but instead 
they were a springboard for action. The op­
portunity to use informal conversations as a 
springboard is there, even when the walls 
are not falling down. The key is to use these 
conversations to learn from one another and 
to get new ideas and then to follow up on 
the conversation with action. 

2) Star t small and see what happens. 
The emergency closure of the library forced 
us to offer off­site reference with a minimum 
of planning and preparation. If we had more 
time to plan, we may have done more to 
recruit staff and to set regular hours. Addi­
tional planning would not necessarily have 
made the service better. We did not know at 

the outset if anyone would talk to us at the 
student center or if anyone would ask research 
questions. Out­of­library reference service at 
other universities has met with success1 and 
with failure.2 By starting small, with just a few 
hours and a couple librarians, we were able to 
test the waters. If there had been no response 
or a negative response to our presence at the 
student center, we would have lost little for 
our efforts. We can take a similar approach 
when we get good and not­so­good ideas for 
new programs and services for the library. 
Starting small and seeing what happens is 
an easy way to separate the good ideas from 
the bad ideas. 

3) Pay it forward. The student center 
provided a table and advertising for us. In­
structional support services made a rush­order 
sign for us. Librarians volunteered to work 
extra reference shifts. None of these people 
had to put in this extra effort, but they did so 
because the library was in an extraordinary 
situation. The goodwill and help above and 
beyond what they had to do continues to 
encourage us to offer not just goodwill but 
to go the extra mile for others. 

Afterward 
Now that the building has reopened, Morris 
Library is continuing to test the waters of off­
site reference. The library will set up a table 
at the student center again during the busiest 
weeks of the fall semester. If this service is 
successful, the library may expand off­site 
services by pulling staff from the information 
desk and putting them in other locations on 
campus. 

Notes 
1. A. Ben Wagner, “On­site reference ser­

vices and outreach: Setting up shop where our 
patrons live” (paper presented to the Special 
Libraries Association National Meeting, Nash­
ville, Tennessee, June 8, 2004), www.acsu. 
buffalo.edu/~abwagner/Outreach­SLAPaper­
2004.htm (accessed June 7, 2006). 

2. Julia K. Nims, “Meeting students on 
their own turf,” Research Strategies 16, no. 1 
(1998): 85­89. 

C&RL News December 2006  700 

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