Join us at the Dixie Convention Center in St. George, Utah for the 2025 Utah Library Association Annual Conference!Registration is now open, with early bird pricing ending March 31. Soon after registering, you will receive a Sched invite to this event so you can plan your conference schedule. See you in St. George!
Log in to bookmark your favorites and sync them to your phone or calendar.
The updated RUSA guidelines encourage librarians to “engage in reference interactions that offer collaborative learning experiences.” However, the guidelines give little new information on how this can be accomplished beyond the traditional engagement tools that have always been encouraged. I suggest a way to change the reference transaction into a collaborative learning experience by drawing from educational tutoring theory and practices from writing centers.
The BYU library has housed the English’s writing center for the last eleven years. As part of this collaborative relationship, the English department trains and provides writing tutors to help students with their writing, and the library trains and provides research tutors to help students with the research process. Recently the library has begun to incorporate some of the educational principles taught on the writing side of this collaboration in addition to principles from the ACRL’s framework and RUSA guidelines for reference interviews. This new educational perspective on a reference interaction can have a transformative effect, making a reference interview become a richer collaborative learning experience for both the patron and librarian.
