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Background & Impetus

Significant drop in reference questions at ULeth beginning April 2020
Reference activity remains substantially lower than pre-pandemic

Evidence shows:

How do we reconnect with students who are not coming to us?

Key question driving the project:

From passive service model to proactive outreach model
From inside the library to meeting students where they are

Strategic shift:

I am going to start by providing some background for the pop-up reference project. The primary contributing factor for this project was a significant drop in reference questions at the University of Lethbridge, that coincided with the beginning of the lockdown periods brought about by COVID-19. While the move to online learning occurred during 2020 and 2021, the drop in reference activity has extended well beyond that, and interaction numbers have failed to recover.

This brings me to the key question driving this project. How do we reconnect with students who are not coming to us? For students who never had a chance to connect with the library in the first place, or students whose experience was disrupted, how do we bridge that gap?

This required a shift in how the ULeth library team thought about our reference service. From passive service to proactive outreach, and from inside the library to meeting students where they are. Our typical roster of reference services included online chat, email, phone, in-person at the service desk, and bookable research appointments, which kept us in the library, waiting for people to come to us. This project made us turn that idea on its head.

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Alberta-Wide Changes in Reference Interactions

Source: Alberta Association of Academic Libraries [AAAL], 2025

I wanted to provide some broader context for this initiative as well. While I already talked about the changes in reference interactions at ULeth, those changes didn’t just affect us. In fact, you can see a similarly significant drop in reference interactions across Albertan academic libraries over the last several years. These statistics are from the Alberta Association of Academic Libraries, and show the changes between 2016 and 2024. AAAL sends out a yearly survey to academic member libraries that captures various data points, including reference numbers. While participation is not mandatory, a similar number and set of institutions send these numbers in on a yearly basis. From 2016 to 2019, numbers are consistently between 250 and 300000. In 2020, we see a big shift down to about 200000, and then from 2021 onward, that number more than halves. Since this presentation was made, the 2025 numbers have been released as well, which are in this same 70 to 90000 range.

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The Core Concern

Students continue to struggle with information literacy and research skills (Folk, 2022; Yevelson-Shorsher & Bronstein, 2018)
Many students:

Are unaware of available services (Empey & Black, 2005; Jameson et al., 2019)
Feel self-sufficient (Jameson et al., 2019)
Prefer convenient, low-barrier support (Zwicky, 2013)

These reference interaction numbers highlight the core concern underlying our pop-up project, which is that students continue to struggle with information literacy and research skills, yet fewer students are seeking out help from the library and its staff.

There are many potential reasons for this, which we found to be reflected in LIS literature. One reason is that many students are unaware of the services available in the library. It is incredibly common for me to meet with a student for the first time and have them tell me that they would have made an appointment with me much sooner if they knew that they could. So library marketing and visibility is an issue. Another reason is that many students feel self-sufficient when it comes to doing library research. As they say, you don’t know what you don’t know. Additionally, students tend to prefer convenient and low-barrier support, and may find it easier to google or ChatGPT something, as opposed to booking and meeting with a librarian, which can be daunting.

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Goals: Overview

Re/Connect with campus community

Contribute to a friendly and personable atmosphere on campus

Meet them where they are at – literally

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Goal 1

Re/Connect with campus community

Remind or further inform current library users
Inform prospective library users

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Goal 2

Contribute to a friendly and personable atmosphere on campus

Highlight the personalized service provided
Highlight humans behind the scenes

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�Need for in-person reference service

Accessibility

Equitable service

Personalization

Preference

(Intahchomphoo & Vellino, 2024; Roberson et. al., 2022; Yazdani, 2024)

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Librarian-on-Location Initiatives

Common Term	Category Attributes
Roving or Roaming Reference	General reference taking place away from a service point but within the library
Embedded Librarianship*	Scheduled subject specific reference outside the library, such as librarian "office hours" taking place in an academic department
Pop-Up Library	Scheduled general reference availability outside the library.

(Villanueva & Craig, 2026)

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Our Service

Temporary pop-up reference service across campus
Staffed by librarians & library staff
Drop-in support:

Research questions
Library services & resources

Short, scheduled sessions during peak periods

So, this brings me to our pop-up reference service. The details of this service were decided upon by a working group at the library, called the Information Literacy and Reference Services Group, which is also the group that staffed the service on a voluntary basis. We decided to host a temporary pop-up reference service that would show up in various locations across campus. We also decided to have it staffed with two people at a time, always including one librarian and one library operations specialist together. This would allow us to provide drop in support in two areas: research questions, which were often handled by the librarian on shift, and library services and resources questions, which were often handled by the library operations specialists. It was also decided to run these sessions in 3 or 4 hour segments, only during peak periods of the semester. This made the service more feasible for staff in terms of the time and labour commitment.

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Service Details

Located in high-traffic areas

Timed around midterms in three rounds: Fall 2023, Spring 2024, & Fall 2024

Simple setup

Flexible format

While we changed locations frequently both within and between pop-up iterations, we tried to choose assumed high-traffic areas, in the hopes that hitting multiple busy areas across campus would reach the broadest audience. We scheduled the pop-up iterations around midterm season in three rounds in Fall 2023, Spring 2024, and Fall 2024, to hit peak times during the semester. We wanted the pop-up to feel welcoming and informal to students, so we had a very simple setup. We started off with one or two tables and chairs on both sides, as well as laptops to answer student questions, and handouts about the library. A key component of our service was the flexibility of our format. Like I mentioned earlier, we changed locations frequently, and we also changed timing. Our initial schedule involved 4-hour days, split into two 2-hour shifts. Using our initial results to inform the next rounds, we shortened the shifts to 3-hour shifts that could be staffed by the same 2-people the entire time, requiring half the staff as our initial set up.

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Service Tracking

Interactions were tracked as one of five question types:

General visit

Facilitative question

Basic question

Complex question

Technology question

Interactions were tracked in 30-minute intervals to identify peak times

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Results by Question Type per Semester

This graph shows an overview of our results in our first three rounds of pop-up reference. It’s a stacked bar chart, so the results are by question type, and within that they are further divided by semester. As you might have expected, general visits were by far the most common interaction type. Students and staff alike were often curious about what we were doing and would stop to chat, but they didn’t have any library-related questions for us to answer. Something you may also have noticed is that our Fall 2023 semester, which was our first round of the pop-up and is shown in light blue, had more interactions than the following semesters. In particular, our Spring 2024 semester had quite a low number of interactions, causing us to remove the Spring offering from our next round of pop-ups.

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Notes on Results

Reasons for the disparity between Spring and Fall interactions:

New student numbers
In-person vs. Online or placement courses
Decline in the novelty of the service
Differences in volunteer approaches
Shift length

As I mentioned, there was quite a disparity between our Spring and Fall interaction numbers, and particularly between Fall 2023 and Spring 2024. And there are several reasons that may have occurred. One is new student numbers. There is a much larger influx of new students in the Fall semesters versus the Spring semester. There is also a change in the number of in-person vs. Online or placement courses at ULeth between semesters, with many online and placement courses happening in the Spring semester. We also considered that there may have been a decline in the novelty of the service for our target audience. Differences in approaches and personalities of our staff volunteers also made a surprising impact. Volunteers who were proactive, and went out of their way to start conversations and keep them going had much higher interaction numbers, and not just for general visits. We hypothesized that giving people the opportunity to stop and chat with a volunteer for a longer amount of time, gave them more time to formulate or realize their library-related questions. Another reason for the disparity was the change in shift length, with shifts moving from 4 to 3 hours, making direct comparisons more difficult.

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Our Service Model

Problem

Declining reference use

Pandemic disruption

Low service awareness

Intervention

Pop-up reference

Librarians-on-location

Outcomes

Increased visibility

New connections

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Key Takeaways

Pop-up reference service outside the library is effective outreach

In-person reference is still valuable

Keep it Simple for Success

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References

Alberta Association of Academic Libraries. (2025, April 28). Alberta Association of Academic Libraries institutional fact sheet, 2016-2025 [Data set]. Tableau Public.

Del Bosque, D., & Chapman, K. (2007). Your place or mine? Face-to-face reference services across campus. New Library World, 108(5–6), 247–262.

Empey, H., & Black, N. E. (2005). Marketing the academic library: Building on the “@ your library” framework. College & Undergraduate Libraries, 12(1–2), 19–33.

Folk, A. (2022). Conceptualising the sociocultural nature of the development of information literacy in undergraduate education. In T. Schlak, S. Corrall, & P. Bracke (Eds.), The social future of academic libraries: New perspectives on communities, networks, and engagement (pp. 183–197). Facet Publishing.

Hines, S. S. (2007). Outpost reference: Meeting patrons on their own ground. Pacific Northwest Library Association Quarterly, 72(1), 12–13.

Holm, C. E., & Kantor, S. (2021). Reference is not dead: A case study of patron habits and library staffing models. Portal: Libraries and the Academy, 21(2), 299–316.

Huwe, T. K. (2003). Casting a wider net with roving reference. Computers in Libraries, 23(3), 34–36.

Intahchomphoo, C., & Vellino, A. (2024). Canadian public library pandemic response: Bridging the digital divide and preparing for future pandemics. Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science, 47(1), 37–51.

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References

Jameson, J., Natal, G., & Napp, J. (2019). Evolving and enduring patterns surrounding student usage and perceptions of academic library reference services. College & Research Libraries, 80(3), 366–385.

Magi, T. J., & Mardeusz, P. E. (2013). Why some students continue to value individual, face-to-face research consultations in a technology-rich world. College & Research Libraries, 74(6), 605–618.

Roberson, C. A., Barefield, T., & Griffith, E. (2022). Students with disabilities and library services: Blending accommodation and universal design. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 48(4), Article 102531.

Villanueva, E., & Craig, R. (2026). From Lockdown to Pop-Up: Reimagining Reference in a Changed World. Partnership: The Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research, 21(1), 1–23.

Yazdani, N. (2024). A pedagogy of care in academic libraries: A framework to increase underrepresented communities’ sense of belonging and engagement. Journal of the Australian Library and Information Association, 73(4), 505–528.

Yevelson-Shorsher, A., & Bronstein, J. (2018). Three perspectives on information literacy in academia: Talking to librarians, faculty, and students. College & Research Libraries, 79(4), 535–553.

Zwicky, D. A. (2013, June 23–26). Work-in-progress: "Ask us here" in the shadow of Hunt Library [Conference presentation]. ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Atlanta, GA, United States.