Although librarians have the goal of helping patrons, one component of the librarian stereotype is that librarians are authoritarian and therefore unapproachable. The stereotype then serves as a means by which librarians become an unintended barrier to effective library use. We term this contradiction between wanting to be helpful and yet perceived as being unapproachable as the problem of the “ironic librarian.” In this research, we used in-depth interviews to examine how individual reference librarians tried to resolve the problem of the ironic librarian. Respondents reported several strategies they used to make themselves more approachable and to alter patrons’ expectations of librarians. Although respondents felt they were successful in enhancing their approachability, they noted that their efforts could also lead them to feel exploited by patrons. These results suggest that librarians can become more approachable and contradict the perspective that views the library as an intimidating space.

中文翻译：

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解决讽刺性图书馆员的困境：图书馆员用来增强可及性的自我报告策略

尽管馆员的目标是帮助顾客，但馆员刻板印象的一个组成部分是馆员是专制的，因此难以接近。刻板印象随后成为图书馆员成为有效使用图书馆的意外障碍的一种手段。我们将这种矛盾称为“有讽刺意味的图书馆员”，这是在想要有所帮助而又被认为无法解决之间。在这项研究中，我们使用了深入的访谈来考察个人参考馆员如何解决讽刺馆员的问题。受访者报告了他们用来使自己变得更加平易近人并改变顾客对图书馆员的期望的几种策略。尽管受访者认为他们成功地提高了他们的可及性，他们指出，他们的努力也可能使他们感到受到顾客的剥削。这些结果表明，图书馆员可以变得更加平易近人，并且与将图书馆视为一个令人生畏的空间的观点相矛盾。