‘The best laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley’, wrote the Scottish poet Robert Burns, musing on how easy it can be for things suddenly to go pear-shaped. How true! If you've stayed with us thus far your schemes will indeed have been ‘best laid’ ones. You'll have analysed the enquirer's needs to establish precisely what they want without any ambiguities, exercised your imagination to work out logically where the answer can be found, and searched systematically and professionally for the information you need. But you still can't find it, and time's running out.

It would be all too easy to feel the panic returning at a time like this. Enquirers really do think that the web has it all and you can get at it instantly, and that can trap you into agreeing to an unrealistic deadline despite your efforts to avoid it. So what you need to do is to manage their expectations while making sure you can deliver what you've promised – which is why it's so important to settle the matter of the deadline from the outset (as we discussed in Chapter 1).

But is the deadline always your problem? It clearly is if your job is to find information on behalf of other people. But what about when it's a student who's come to you with a really complex assignment which (as they so often seem to do) they've started far too late. Well, to be hard-nosed about it, you have two choices. You can tell them it's their problem and they should have thought of it sooner, leaving them to go off disgruntled with you and the library – or possibly to waste the time of a colleague on another desk in a different department.

Or you can demonstrate your professionalism in advising them what they can do in the limited time available, thereby casting yourself in the role of mentor rather than critic.

There's a saying in show business that amateurs rehearse so that everything goes right and professionals rehearse so that nothing goes wrong. It's a great definition of the difference between an amateur and a professional, in any profession.

Just think how it works with a show. Amateurs haven't a clue what could go wrong, so they have to rehearse everything equally. Professionals have the training, the knowledge, the experience to know where the danger points are in a production – the rapid scene change, the complex piece of business – and concentrate on those. Yet amateurs can manage to put on a good show eventually, with practice. And exactly the same applies to one of the most hazardous parts of enquiry work: searching.

The problem is that, since everyone has access now to an apparently limitless pool of instantly available information, anyone can assume that they're an expert searcher. So information professionals – the ones who earn their living by searching, or advising people on how to search – have to be able to demonstrate that there are ways of searching smarter, even when they're using exactly the same tools as their enquirers. What can distinguish you, the professional, from your enquirer, the amateur? A lot of it is down to thinking systematically.

Who needs to be able to search smarter?

The short answer is: everyone. It doesn't matter whether you're doing the searching yourself or helping others to do so, you need to understand the principles behind it so that the whole process happens as smoothly and efficiently as possible. Just think why …

If you're working in a public reference library you may well find yourself dealing with people to whom searching doesn't come naturally. A personal visitor may require a lot of hand-holding while you help them discover the information they need. At the same time, a queue may be building up at the enquiry desk – or, if you've gone on an expedition to the shelves with your enquirer, other people may start hovering round waiting for you to become free.

Picture the scene. You're in the kitchen getting ready for a dinner party and you think your partner has just said: ‘Have you got the time?’ So you could reply: ‘It's ten to eight and the guests are going to be here any moment, so let's get on with it.’ Or you could say: ‘Do you mean what time is it now or how long does it take to cook?’ To which your partner replies patiently: ‘No, darling – did you remember to buy the thyme?’

By simply telling your partner the time you'll have taken the question at face value. But by answering the question with a question you'll have dealt with any potential misunderstanding from the outset – and in this case, misunderstanding there certainly was. The question used in this little domestic drama was a forced choice question – one of several specific question types, each of which can be deployed for a particular purpose. In this instance, it helped to defuse a little bit of potential personal strife. When you use this and other questioning techniques at work, it can save you a deal of trouble from the outset.

You'll deal with many of your enquirers orally, face to face. The possibilities for misunderstandings are endless – accent, articulation, assumptions, all can send you scurrying off in totally the wrong direction, wasting both your time and the enquirer's. But with face-to-face enquiries, you are at least offered lots of clues; most of what we communicate is nonverbal, so you are able to glean what you can from facial expression, eye contact, body language. But you are deprived of these clues when your queries come in by phone, and you have even less to go on when they arrive in written form – by e-mail or text for instance. We'll look at remote enquiry handling in Chapter 2 – but right now, let's assume that the enquirer is standing in front of you. In our journey from what the enquirer asked to what they actually wanted to know, we need to deploy our analytical thinking skills.

‘Please listen carefully to the following three options: To annoy the customer, press 1; to waste everybody's time, press 2; to lose business, press 3.’

Up to now we've been assuming that your encounter with the enquirer has been face to face; we've learned quite a bit about what can go wrong if you don't anticipate potential misunderstandings and be ready to deal with them before they happen. But at least you've had plenty of other clues – besides what you and the enquirer actually say to one another – to reinforce your suspicion that things might be going wrong.

You might detect a pained expression flitting across the enquirer's face as they realize that they're not getting their needs across. They might be drumming their fingers with impatience at the lack of progress, or standing with their arms akimbo as if to demand an explanation. Or they might be avoiding eye contact with you – indicating, perhaps, that they have something to hide or, worse, that they don't have confidence in your ability to help them.

When you observe ‘tells’ like this, that does at least give you an opportunity to take remedial action. But when you can't see, and sometimes can't even hear, your enquirer, you have none of these clues to draw upon, and that means that even more things can go wrong than we encountered in Chapter 1.

As the quote at the start of this chapter indicates, remote contact centres tend to have a pretty terrible reputation. But when you do encounter a good one, you'll find it leads the way in high-quality customer service. That lesson applies just as much to information services as it does to those provided by banks, travel firms or IT helpdesks. Like them or loathe them, people are expecting more and more of the services they need to be delivered remotely.

They may be students who want instant guidance from their university resource centre before embarking on their own literature search online.

Fear of the unknown is the oldest and strongest kind, said the horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft. Well ‘fear’ may be pitching it a bit strong in this context, but if you're anything like most people at this stage in the enquiryanswering process you're certainly feeling pretty nervous and possibly starting to panic. You've listened carefully to your enquirer. You've asked sensible questions. You know exactly what they want. Now your enquirer is waiting for you to help. And you haven't a clue where to start looking.

Fortunately, there are techniques for dealing with this. All you need is a little bit of thinking time. You can buy this time with a positive response – something like: ‘I'm sure I can help; let me just think for a moment where would be the best place to start.’ You'll pick your own form of words, of course, but having a response like this ready all the time is going to be really useful. First, it dispenses instant reassurance to the enquirer; you've promised to help. So, second, that means the enquirer will metaphorically step back and give you the few seconds’ thinking time you need. Third, of course, a response like this commits you to nothing. It certainly doesn't commit you to finding the answer, because you don't know whether you can do that yet. But it does commit you to helping – and you can always help.

How? By exercising your imaginative thinking skills. Let's see how this works in practice …

Imagining the final answer

To deal with the ‘fear’ – or at least the panic – you need to turn the unknown into the known as quickly as possible: in this case, knowing where to go to find the information the enquirer needs. You've just bought yourself some thinking time to help you do this, so how are you going to make the best use of it? It's tempting to simply look busy – turn confidently to the nearest printed reference source you can find, or click onto a search engine and pretend you know what you're doing.

‘Give us the tools and we will finish the job’, said Winston Churchill famously during World War 2 – and that's the stage we've reached too. Up to now we've tended not to mention specific sources or products by name but just to refer to them generically. This is a manual about skills, after all – not a sourcebook. But if you've stuck with us this far, you'll be aware that we've referred to search engines, enquiry tracking systems, library management systems and the discovery facilities they can offer, reference management software – and above all specific information sources that can get you started on a whole range of enquiries. So this final chapter includes links to a selection of resources that you might find useful in your enquiry work. None of the lists in this chapter are exhaustive, and professional peers may dispute some of the choices. But hopefully they'll be enough to give you a flying start.

But before we launch into those, we still mustn't lose sight of the fact that the best single tool at your disposal is your ability to think your way from problem to solution. We've seen that at work throughout the book, and it applies just as much when you're planning a shopping expedition for resources that can help you in your enquiry work. It should be pretty obvious, really, that you can't reach any decisions on how to tool up until you've worked out what your enquirers are likely to need and the demands you can expect them to put on your service. This is true whether you're providing information to the public, to an academic community or to your colleagues and clients in a specialist organization. It requires some detailed thought before you take any irrevocable decisions, and brings in yet another thinking skill: predictive thinking.

Making best use of your Time, Intellect and Money

Every service you provide, and every tool you acquire, is likely to consume three principal resources in different degrees: your Time, your Intellect and (of course) your organization's Money. Clearly everything you do involves money in terms of the time you devote to each task. But only one of these three involves hard cash – the one resource that is overtly limited in terms of your budget – and that's Money. The other two resources are limited only by your ability.

Twenty-one years ago – almost to the day actually – I rented a small holiday cottage on the Isle of Wight, hired a large and clunky computer from a local firm (for rather more than the cost of renting the cottage) and settled down to draft the first edition of this book. At that time I never thought there would be a second edition, let alone a seventh.

Since then, some things have come full circle. We now live on the Island most of the time, so it's here again that this edition has been penned. But when it comes to the information profession – the people whose job is to answer enquiries for a living – it's difficult to decide whether we're talking about a straight road from the book-lined room to a world of virtual crowdsourced content or, again, about a situation where things have come full circle.

Let me explain. When people want to satisfy their immediate curiosity these days they're much more likely to turn to social media on their mobile device than ask their local library. So the days of flesh and blood intervention in this kind of quick reference enquiry are inevitably numbered.

But the professional skills that underpin them are not. They keep coming round and they work for anyone whose job is to provide information, advice and guidance using third party sources to help them. So they're also transferrable skills, relevant not only in libraries but also for anyone whose job is to provide learning support to students, work with research teams or offer contact centre services.

In my work as a trainer, I'm increasingly being asked to develop modules and courses that address new value-added activities, and particularly in taking the process beyond the traditional outcome: delivery of raw literature search results with no further comment. Clients for this kind of training include specialist organizations of all kinds, government, law firms and, most recently, health bodies.

So although the book's coverage of the underlying skills remains fundamentally the same, I felt that at least some of the emphasis needed to change. Particularly in the later chapters, there's now much more focus on the information professional's role in things like fostering information literacy, managing the desk research process and presenting research results effectively.

Spotlight is a movie that tells the true story of how journalists at the Boston Globe lifted the lid on a major cover-up in the Roman Catholic Church. During their investigations, the team did everything you would expect investigative journalists to do: they door-stepped people; they confronted leading figures; they waited for hours in outer offices trying to grab interviews. But the backbone of their research was a simple spreadsheet onto which they made entries from back issues of the Massachusetts Catholic Directory. It was this that enabled them to spot the suspicious patterns of behaviour that underpinned their revelations.

This kind of activity is increasing dramatically in importance. At the rocket science end of the spectrum, it's manifesting itself as Big Data, where analysts develop and employ applications to trawl vast quantities of data, looking for patterns that can be turned into e-commerce or other opportunities. But the principle of applying critical analysis to retrieved data operates across the board – including to the human brain power that we bring to bear in carrying out literature searches.

Of course, we mere mortals do face limitations – mainly in the tiny amount of content we are capable of evaluating within a sensible timescale compared with what computers can achieve. But that doesn't mean that we're incapable of doing it. We've already looked briefly at some of the principles of good time management in Chapter 5 and, crucially, at the distinction between vital and urgent tasks. And it's with this next task in particular – synthesizing your search results into a narrative report on the findings – that those principles really demonstrate their value.

Techniques such as those described in this chapter carry obvious lessons for information professionals who carry out desk research on their users’ behalf. But they're no less valuable for academic librarians too. Charged with promoting and encouraging good information literacy practice, they can draw their own users’ attention to the benefits such techniques can offer and the higher quality of research they are likely to produce as a result. So, as with the searching techniques we looked at in Chapter 4, information professionals whose job is to encourage good research practice in others, such as students doing assignments, should find masses in this chapter that they can also pass on to those they support – in particular, use of critical thinking skills.

‘It ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it,’ goes the old Ella Fitzgerald song. True enough – but the real wisdom is in the last line: ‘That's what gets results’.

Whether you're helping members of the public, mentoring students or providing a full research service to a specific organization, there's every reason to take pride in the answers you provide. This is partly for your personal satisfaction, but it's also really good customer relations. A service that looks and sounds good inspires customer confidence and wins repeat business; one that doesn't risks losing that confidence, resulting in declining business and possibly even closure. In helping people find the information they want, you haven't been doing something easy, you've been doing something highly skilled – so don't spoil it with a weak finish.

Obviously, presenting your answer well matters when you're providing finished research results. (We're going to look at this in more detail in Chapter 7.) But it's just as important to be clear and concise – and to prioritize the information you provide – when you're advising enquirers on sources or search techniques. Presentation also matters when you're advising on a transaction such as how to request a document, access an electronic resource, use an online service or follow a procedure. Whatever the circumstances, presentation isn't an optional extra; it's an essential ingredient for the future development of your service. To achieve it, you need to be able to think creatively.

Quality-checking your answer

But just before you present your answer, it's wise to have one final quality check – just to make sure you haven't missed anything important or accidentally done something silly. As with so many of these stages in the enquiry-answering process, it may seem a bit tedious – but it's far better if you discover a howler before delivering the answer rather than letting the enquirer find it afterwards. So a few thoughts on final things to check …