Policies are created or updated in two different ways: Either we see a need in advance and formulate policy to fulfill the perceived need, or something occurs which spurs us to create policy in response. This is a tale of the latter.

This summer (2010) at the New York Public Library’s AskNYPL phone and virtual reference service we received a message that may have been sent by someone who was considering suicide. While we responded well, it was a bit of a shaking experience and we went to check what our official policies were afterwards. What we found was fifty pages of legalese buried in a manual that nobody uses.  Even had we been aware of the policy it would not have helped, so we set out to find a decent policy from another institution to work from.

A survey of other libraries showed us that there wasn’t a useful policy at any of the twelve largest metropolitan library systems in the United States.  Therefore, the decision was made to generate our own policy. Not having a reasonable library policy to work from, we based our policy on the recommendations of nonprofits which specialize in service to the depressed, suicidal, or those groups with notably high suicide rates at present. These nonprofits provided us enough material to work with while preventing us from needing to “reinvent the wheel”.

From the beginning the plan was to produce a policy which could be printed on a single sheet of paper so that it would be accessible and usable. A long policy may be comprehensive but will probably go unread and thus be essentially no policy.

Once the policy was created it was reviewed by legal counsel, as all such things are, and once it had the approval, it became official. This made NYPL the first large metropolitan library to have a useful and accessible policy for these kinds of calls and it was made possible via our virtual reference service’s awareness of the issue.

In the spirit of sharing information and professional ideas, the policy and its evolution were shared with librarians and other interested parties at the Community Virtual Library’s (CVL) monthly Hot Topics discussion series. This gave us a chance to get feedback from other professionals and to spread the idea of what we were doing to other libraries with which we otherwise wouldn’t have had a chance to communicate.

For details of the policy discussed in here please visit the full article in American Libraries at: http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/features/08132010/when-crisis-calls