Assessing reference services training through student staff satisfaction
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Most research on satisfaction with academic library reference services explores patron, not staff, satisfaction. The research team speculated that understanding staff satisfaction with reference interactions could be used as a tool to help determine the proficiency of reference staff training. During the academic school years of 2019–2020 and 2022–2023, student reference desk staff at the University of Toronto’s Engineering & Computer Science Library were asked to complete a survey after each reference interaction. The survey questions assessed both staff satisfaction and their perception of patron satisfaction against variables such as time of year, patron time constraints, number of questions asked, type of question(s), and patron affiliation. Results showed that staff were satisfied with most interactions, however, they would benefit from reminders that information may not exist for some reference questions, and staff should not internalize this or be hard on themselves. In interactions where staff expressed the most dissatisfaction, ambiguity in any form appeared to affect staff satisfaction more than any of the other factors. Moving forward, exploring how other fields develop training and strategies to help staff manage high levels of on-the-job ambiguity could be applied to better support library reference staff training.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it