Patron Behavior in Libraries: A Handbook of Positive Approaches to Negative Situations

Abstract

How do you deal with homeless patrons who come to the library to sleep? What about young adults who come to the library to party? Just what is a behaviour policy and does your library need one? 15 contributors have teamed up to provide answers to these and many other questions, and to provide sound strategies for dealing with negative patron behaviour. They provide practical prescriptive guidelines for identifying and effectively responding to a variety of behaviour problems. Also, they offer librarians proactive methods for preventing patron problems. Librarians must clearly recognise the most common sources of negative patron behaviour and understand the legal implications of any actions they take to counteract it. For example, it is rare when a patron poses a clear physical threat to staff and other patrons. It is more common when a patron is merely disruptive. However, in order to respond effectively to all of their patrons, librarians need to be ready to handle both extremes of negative patron behaviour - and everything in between. Among the topics addressed in this book are: down and out in the reading room - the homeless in the public library; coping with mentally ill patrons; problem patrons in the academic library; sexual harassment of library staff by patrons; and developing and implementing a patron behaviour policy.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 18 citations exist upstream.