Reference Requests
Reference services form the second pillar of our purpose at the Dixon Pentecostal Research Center—the first being preservation. In the contemporary world, these services can take on many forms: walk-ins, scheduled visits, phone calls, emails to a staff member or the Center's address, social media messages, patron submission of the online request form (see below), etc.
Patrons
We serve a wide range of people: denominational officials and their staffs, academic historians and theologians, local churches and their leaders, family members of those who are possibly in our holdings, community members, and other archives with similar and overlapping missions, to name a few. We need to provide professional and courteous interactions with all of them.
On-site assistance
For scheduled or walk-in reference assistance, remember this preeminent principal: our holdings are not removed from the Center and our first task is to preserve them. See Guidelines for Use - Dixon Pentecostal Research Center for additional guidance.
1) Request the patron to sign-in on the iPad in Envoy.
2) Research interview: the "conversation between an archivist and a researcher designed to give the researcher an orientation to the use of the materials, to help the researcher identify relevant holdings, and to ensure that research needs are met." This interaction may be as brief as a patron handing the staff member a catalog call number for a single book to be used or it can be an in-depth conversation between the Archivist or Director and a professional historian on the extent of our holdings on a particular subject that may be helpful to the researcher.
3) The researcher is to use one of the seats available in the Reading Room while doing their work with the materials that the staff member retrieves from the stacks, vault, or other location. Handling of the materials should be done according to the methods and standards of the training. Remember: many of our items are old and fragile. Follow your training when it comes to using and requiring the use of gloves, book cradles, and other tools.
Off-site assistance
Reference services to those off-site are provided on a first-come, first-served and as-able basis. Recognizing that many users are now physically remote from the Research Center when assistance is needed, it is our goal to provide, as much as possible, full reference service for questions received. In order to do that at a level of excellence, we need as much information as possible, clear questions, and clear deadlines.
Whenever you receive a request for researched information by email, phone call, social media, etc., follow the below procedure.
Patrons
We serve a wide range of people: denominational officials and their staffs, academic historians and theologians, local churches and their leaders, family members of those who are possibly in our holdings, community members, and other archives with similar and overlapping missions, to name a few. We need to provide professional and courteous interactions with all of them.
On-site assistance
For scheduled or walk-in reference assistance, remember this preeminent principal: our holdings are not removed from the Center and our first task is to preserve them. See Guidelines for Use - Dixon Pentecostal Research Center for additional guidance.
1) Request the patron to sign-in on the iPad in Envoy.
2) Research interview: the "conversation between an archivist and a researcher designed to give the researcher an orientation to the use of the materials, to help the researcher identify relevant holdings, and to ensure that research needs are met." This interaction may be as brief as a patron handing the staff member a catalog call number for a single book to be used or it can be an in-depth conversation between the Archivist or Director and a professional historian on the extent of our holdings on a particular subject that may be helpful to the researcher.
3) The researcher is to use one of the seats available in the Reading Room while doing their work with the materials that the staff member retrieves from the stacks, vault, or other location. Handling of the materials should be done according to the methods and standards of the training. Remember: many of our items are old and fragile. Follow your training when it comes to using and requiring the use of gloves, book cradles, and other tools.
Off-site assistance
Reference services to those off-site are provided on a first-come, first-served and as-able basis. Recognizing that many users are now physically remote from the Research Center when assistance is needed, it is our goal to provide, as much as possible, full reference service for questions received. In order to do that at a level of excellence, we need as much information as possible, clear questions, and clear deadlines.
Whenever you receive a request for researched information by email, phone call, social media, etc., follow the below procedure.
The submitted form automatically creates a task for the archivist in Asana and notifies them so they can determine and assign the course of action.
If you are assigned to a reference request, then the subtasks and updates will be tracked in Asana. Be sure to add appropriate comments and mark tasks and sub-tasks completed in the system. If you send the researcher an email in response, paste the content in a comment to the task. Include a comment stating how much time you worked on the request.
Updated: January 13, 2025
If you are assigned to a reference request, then the subtasks and updates will be tracked in Asana. Be sure to add appropriate comments and mark tasks and sub-tasks completed in the system. If you send the researcher an email in response, paste the content in a comment to the task. Include a comment stating how much time you worked on the request.
Updated: January 13, 2025
