Il reference come counselling bibliotecario nelle biblioteche accademiche

Abstract

The paper deals with the figure of the reference librarian, not only as an information specialist but also as a user psychologist, defining the reference service as library counselling, and assimilating the librarian to a psychologist and the user interview to a psychological counselling. The librarian must know how to develop empathic listening, putting himself in the students’ place, understanding their unexpressed needs and their requests, in order to provide them with the necessary means (information literacy) to manage, both in quality and quantity, the amount of information (information overload) arriving from increasingly varied communication channels.