Paper details
Materials for WORKSHOP A
Author
Tim Buckley Owen, Independent Information Industry Commentator, United Kingdom
Documents to download
Abstract
Everyone knows that answering enquiries in the 21st century is completely different from how it was in the 20th and it’s technology that has made all the difference – right?
Wrong! Technology is just the enabler. It’s enquirers’ habits and expectations that have changed. 21st century enquirers are remote, mobile and think they know it all. So how are library and information professionals to respond?
Join Tim Buckley Owen, author of Successful Enquiry Answering Every Time, to find out how you can ensure that your people skills are fit for the 21st century.
When we can’t see, and often can’t even hear our enquirer, we are deprived of over 90% of the clues that we take for granted when dealing with people face-to-face. The risk of misunderstanding – even offence – is high. So our questioning and customer care skills are more important than ever before. Your enquirer frequently has access to exactly the same information resources as you do, on the web. So you have to demonstrate your professionalism by adding value to your answer and locking the enquirer into your services.
With assistance from INFORUM keynote speaker Barbara Buckley Owen, this lively workshop will offer plenty of opportunity for group discussion and problem solving. It will help you get to grips with some of the challenges of being a 21st century library and information professional – including some that you probably never even thought of.
The workshop is organized in cooperation with CERGE-EI.
