Shadowing a Librarian for Chinese Collections at UC Berkeley's C. V. Starr East Asian Library: This paper is a discussion of my observations from shadowing an academic librarian performing reference and reference collection development work. I apply the Guidelines for Behavioral Performance of Reference and Information Service Providers established by the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA guidelines) as a metric of evaluation for the reference interactions I witnessed. The ensuing analysis includes how the librarian’s responsibilities align with trends described in contemporary literature about academic librarianship, particularly in regards to reference and subject specialties. Lastly, I identify the impacts of the COVID-10 pandemic on reference work and academic librarianship at large, as well as possible implications for the future. This paper concludes with a personal reflection of the shadowing experience and how it aligns with the San Jose State University School of Information core competencies.

Tina Kremzner-Hsing is native to the California Bay Area. She attended UC Berkeley for undergrad, where she majored in art history and minored in Chinese language and Turkish language. She will be entering her third semester of the MLIS program at SJSU in the Fall of 2021. Although she has not yet settled on a career pathway to pursue in the LIS field, Tina hopes to find a way to meld her passion for the environment, love for learning foreign languages and organization/preservation of documents by the end of this program! The opportunity to shadow a subject librarian for a specific linguistic and cultural region at an academic institution has inspired her to look deeper into the realm of information intermediation and instruction.