Digital Reference

Moving Days for Library Communication Channels

2009-06-23T09:14:00.005-04:00

I've been busy this summer engineering two online moves and launching a new blog. For four and a half years, our library's reference wiki and reference staff blog have been at hosted services (PBworks, formerly PBwiki, and Blogspot, respectively). Having witnessed a number of free online services go belly up over the few years (e.g., Yahoo! Photos, Google Video, Google Notebook, Jaiku, etc.), I decided that it would be best to run these essential communication services on servers we fully control. We're nearly done moving our password-protected reference staff wiki (which is essential a policy and procedures manual, as well as a repository of inside dope) from PBworks to Confluence. This week, we officially relaunched the staff blog, Reference at Newman Library, on WordPress MU, which is locally installed and administered here on the Baruch campus by the cracker-jack team at the Schwartz Communication Institute.

The new home for the blog features a Google Custom Search Engine that searches for content on both the old and new homes for the blog. We've been using Delicious for years to tag and index our posts and will continue to do so.

Moving the wiki from PBworks proved particularly hard. Because of the lack of interoperability among many wiki platforms, there was no easy way to import the 500 pages from the PBwiki version of the wiki to the new Confluence one. Instead, a dedicated and detail-oriented student employee copied and pasted text and recreated links. The version of Confluence that we have installed here does not offer all the bells and whistles that PBworks does, but when we get the new version set up and add in a few plugins, it should be as rich an environment for the user as what we had in PBwiki.

Later this week, we'll officialy launch another new staff blog that is intended to highlight issues and news of interest to all library staff in our library. Called the Newman Library Idea Lab, this blog written by and for the folks who work here. Feel free to subscribe, though, as the content should be of interest to anyone who works in most any outpost in libraryland.

Pointing to Open Access Journals

2009-05-22T15:08:00.002-04:00

A post on the iNODE blog, "OA Begins at Home," struck a chord with me. We should be doing more to ensure that open access content is findable in our discovery systems (link resolvers, A-Z journal lists, even the databases we subscribe to).

Essential Chat Reference Skills and Training Techniques

2009-05-22T10:04:00.019-04:00

I recently discovered that the San Jose State University School of Library and Information Science has a podcast series from its colloquia (here's the feed URL) that includes a nice presentation by Lili Luo from 2007 about chat reference skills and chat reference training. There are number of ways to access the recording of her presentation:

Watch the streaming version of the video on the SJSU SLIS page
Download the audio recording (MP3)
Download the video recording (MP4)

As part of her doctoral work at UNC Chapel hill, she surveyed nearly six hundred librarians about what they felt were the essential chat reference skills. Then she held another survey that close to three hundred librarians responded to in which respondents noted which training techniques they had encountered when being shown how to do chat reference.

Of the thirty compentencies listed in the first survey, twenty-one were deemed essential. As noted on Luo's slides from her presentation, the top five were:

Refererring users to appropriate/services when necessary
Skills in selecting and searching databases and internet resources
Familiarity with subscribed library databases
Ability to think quickly and deal flexibly with unexpected situations
Using open probes to clarify questions

The survey on chat reference training techniques asked respondents to rate twenty-three different approaches for teaching. The top ones that Luo listed on her slides were:

Trainees pair up as patron and librarian to gains hands-on experience on using the software
Trainees review selected chat transcripts to learn more about the transation
Trainees ask questions to real chat reference services as users and evaluate their experiences - the secret shopper approach
Librarians pair up to practice chat reference skills on a regular basis for a certain period of time
Cheat sheet containing vital information librarians might need to access quickly and often while covering the service

There is tons of great stuff here that should help anyone who has to train colleagues in how to do chat reference. The only quibble I have is Luo's description of a competency that is unique to chat reference: the knowledge of library services and resources of other libraries in a chat reference consortium. She suggests that to provide effective service in a cooperative service, librarians must have a basic level of familiarity with the services and resources provided at each member library. I don't think that quite gets to the real skill that librarians who do chat in a cooperative environment have to master.

What is essential is that librarians are familiar enough with the wide range of services (and ways of offering those services) that a library elsewhere in the cooperative might offer. As a librarian at Baruch College helping students at UC San Diego in the QuestionPoint 24/7 Reference Academic Cooperative, I don't need to have memorized all the services at UC San Diego. I just need to know how to navigate the library's web site to see if such a service that the student is asking about is offered and how it is offered. In QuestionPoint, we also have online "cheat sheets" on each library in the cooperative that give you a quick overview of that library and its services and resources (as well as the relevant links to the library's many web pages). If UC San Diego happens to loan digital cameras to students, I am not expected to have memorized that fact; but I should know how to find out if the UC San Diego library does so if I am ever asked about.

As far as familiarity with resources at member libraries go, again, I don't need to have memorized what libraries have which databases. But I must know how to locate any library's list of databases. I should also know how to recommend databases that I am unfamiliar with based on subject guides, etc., that a library has put up. At no point, though, am I expected to have the ability to list from memory what resoruces each library has. With hundreds of libraries in the academic cooperative, it just isn't possible to memorize like that even if you wanted to.

Dont' let this very minor quibble, though, deter you from checking out what is a wonderful presentation.

Interesting Blog for GIS

2009-05-18T13:02:00.002-04:00

My colleague here at the Newman Library at Baruch College, Frank Donnelly, writes a really interesting blog that focuses on issues and technologies for GIS. Launched in March 2008, Gothos features coverage of new GIS resources and detailed step-by-step instructions for various projects using GIS software.

Grab the feed here.

Bye Bye PBwiki, Hello Confluence

2009-05-17T22:02:00.002-04:00

After having PBwiki host the wiki for our reference staff for the past four and a half years, I'm finally taking the plunge to move to whole thing (499 pages!) over to a locally installed version of Confluence. The college where I work got Confluence to use for various intranets needed around campus. Worried that some day PBwiki might just plain disappear, I decided to move the reference wiki over to something that is on our own servers and more under our control. It will take a chunk of the summer to laboriously recreate the wiki via copy and paste (wiki software from different vendors don't seem to make it easy to do import/exports). So much for that long week at the beach...

Curate a Local Calendar for Your Community

2009-05-11T22:04:00.005-04:00

I don't know if any libraries have taken this task on, but I think it would be really cool and make a lot of sense for a library to take on the role of helping create a community calendar. I'm not thinking about having a library meticulously build the calendar from scratch; instead, there are tools out there that can help you harvest calendar data on the web, aggregate it, and then republish the package so that people can then add as an overlay to their personal calendars (in Google Calendar and the like).

This spring, Jon Udell has written a number of blog posts about his elmcity project. Udell has found a way for people to use Delicious to gather together web sites that publish calendars. Following his instructions, those who set up a Delicious account for a specific town or city use specific tagging conventions as they add items to their Delicious accounts. Udell, in turn, passes the data that builds up in Delicious on to a system he set up using Microsoft Azure. The calendar data for each community is bundled together then and offered as a unified iCalendar feed. You can see examples of these bundled community calendars on this aggregator page Udell set up. Udell offers a number of ways to learn more about this project:

Basically, all that a library would need to do would be to set up a dedicated Delicious account, bookmark some calendar feeds in Delicious, and then publicize the new calendar that has been built. There's no coding, no programming required; just bookmarking and tagging. It doesn't take too much imagination to see that a library, particularly a public library, could really provide an outstanding service to its community by participating in this project.

Citation Tools: Can We Trust Them Yet?

2009-05-11T10:08:00.004-04:00

A recent blog post at Shinylib raises an interesting issue that should be on the radar screen of anyone who helps students format citations: the citation tools we recommend are not to be trusted yet. I've been using ProCite 5 for a decade now, and have fooled around with Zotero, EndNote, and RefWorks, a fair amount. I've also used the citation export features from most databases that our library subscribes to. In the end, I have always found that some errors or problems exist in the automatically formatted citations that require me to do some hands-on clean up work with.

Just as it is dangerous to promote spellcheck features in word processors as 100% reliable, so to is it problematic to encourage a blind faith in the citation-creation tools in various electronic systems. I haven't checked any of the tools yet, but I wonder if they have wrestled yet with how to update the rules for creating citations in the new MLA style.

New Citation Rules in the 7th Edition of the MLA Handbook

2009-05-04T12:30:00.003-04:00

I got my copy of the newly published seventh edition of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers in the mail a few days ago and have been thumbing through it to see what's new in guidelines for creating a list of works cited. There are a number of notable changes from the sixth edition by Joseph Gibaldi.

Descriptors for Publication Medium

Items cited should now describe the "medium of publication consulted" (136). So if your source was the print edition (of a book, report, article, etc.), then you place the word "Print" at the end of the citation. If the item is from a subscription database or out on the open web, then you place the word "Web" at the end. If it was some sort of a broadcast, then you can use "Radio" or "Television." If it was an audio recording, there are choices like "CD" or "LP." For movies, you have choices like "Film," "DVD," "Videocassette," "Sound filmstrip," "Laser disc," and "Slide program."

There are many others mediums to use, including a bunch you use when you are citing a digital file that you have access to independent of the source where it was originally published, such as "a PDF file stored on your computer, a document created by a peer using a word processor, a scanned image you received as an e-mail attachment, and a sound recording formatted for playing on a digital audio player" (210-211). Here are some of the medium designators suggested for these situations: "MP3 file," "PDF file," "JPEG file," "Microsoft Word file," etc.

Briefer Citations for Items in a Subscription Database

Another key change in the seventh edition is that articles found in a subscription database now have a much more compact citation. Gone are the URL for database (which was always a silly proposition) and the name of the subscribing institution (i.e., the name of the library).

Sixth edition: Carnovsky, Leon. "The Obligations and Responsibilities of the Librarian Concerning Censorship." Library Quarterly 20 (1950): 21-32. JSTOR. Baruch College, Newman Library. 4 May 2009.

Seventh edition: Carnovsky, Leon. "The Obligations and Responsibilities of the Librarian Concerning Censorship." Library Quarterly 20 (1950): 21-32. JSTOR. Web. 4 May 2009.

URLs Not Always Required in Citations

I found this change a bit perplexing. The sixth edition always advised URLs for web resources. The seventh edition now argues that adding "URLs has proved to have limited value, however, for they often change, can be specific to a subscriber or session of use, and can be so long and complex that typing them into a browser is cumbersome and prone to transcription errors" (182). It is noted that people are more reliant on search to find known items on the web than on typing in URLs. The URL should be added as "supplementary information only when the reader probably cannot locate the source without it or when your instructor requires it" (182).

If a student is clearly told by a teacher to add URLs, that's no problem. But what if the instructor just assumes that the student will use the new edition of the MLA Handbook; then the student will need to make decisions about the findability of a web resource. Making those decisions, though, will not be easy for the student, as the Handbook really does not offer guidance about how to assess the probability of someone being able to find a web resource you've cited. If I were an instructor or someone making a guide to MLA citations for the library web site, I would tell students to always include the URL. Even if the URL gets mangled somewhat, the domain name may be in good enough shape that at the very least it offers a starting point for someone wishing to track down the resource.

There is much more that I want to explore in this new edition, which also has a companion web site that I have yet to really nose around in. That site has the full text of the book as well as a couple of case examples showing students moving through the entire research and writing process. When news of this web site became known to librarians, there were interesting discussions on the list of the ACRL Literatures in English Section and on FriendFeed regarding the limited license for access to the companion web site. Basically, it looks like a library that owns a copy of the book can show the online version to students (in reference interactions, classroom settings, etc.) but can't give them the login information.

Gibaldi, Joseph. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 6th ed. New York: MLA, 2003. Print.

Modern Language Association. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 7th ed. New York: MLA, 2009. Print.

My Workshop on "Effective Chat Reference"

2009-04-28T15:49:00.008-04:00

Today I led a workshop at the Metropolitan Library Council of New York titled, "Effective Chat Reference." I had nine attendees, who all asked great questions and kept me on my toes.

Although I've trained dozens of librarians over the years about how to do chat reference, it's always been in the context of the chat reference service offered by the library at my college (Baruch College). In those workshops, I was showing my colleagues how to use our software to help our students following our reference policy. Today's workshop was trickier because I had to teach chat reference that were transferrable to any chat or IM software environment.

As you can see from the handout below, I broke the training down into six sections: general principles of chat reference; how to greet patrons; how to clarify the question; how to connect patrons to sources; how to close a session; and how to deal with rude patrons.

To ensure that we could have some hands-on activities in a chat environment, I created five separate Meebo rooms in which attendees were paired up with each other and had a chance to play librarian and patron with each other. Despite Meebo's recent notoriety for being unstable, I had no problems with it and found it an easy way to set up chat space for the workshop participants.

I also tried another experiment that I had never done before using a different free web service, EtherPad, which lets a group of people simultaneously edit a shared document. Usually, at the start of workshops, I like to ask everyone in the room to introduce themselves (name and institutional affiliation) and tell me about what they hope to get out out of the instruction. Today, I set up an EtherPad, gave out the URL to everyone, and let them type up this information in the first few minutes of the class. We had a few problems getting everyone to the URL for the shared document, as EtherPad generates really odd-looking URLs for any new page you set up (it's a mix of numbers and lower- and upper-case letters). Once everyone was there and typed up their information, it was nice that we could all see it on the screen and get a sense of who was in the room. One of the attendees was tweeting the workshop, too!

One thing that I hadn't planned for was that a little more than half of the attendees did not actually do chat or IM reference themselves, nor did the libraries where they worked have such a service. I had not wanted to make this a workshop about how to set up a chat reference service; instead, I wanted to focus on how to make the most of the communication medium to have successful reference interactions. In the end, I answered quite a few questions about how the cooperative service at QuestionPoint works. I also put in a pitch for Library H3lp, Meebo, and Spark as IM/chat reference software solutions. Finally, I also encouraged all who attended to check out anything that Marie Radford has published or presented in the last few years, as her work with Lynn Silipigni Connaway on the Seeking Synchronicity project has yielded all sorts of fascinating insights into what users and librarians think of chat reference services.

Francoeur Effective Chat Reference METRO 28 April 2009

Publish at Scribd or explore others: How-to-Guides & Manu digital reference im reference

Unconferences: Ur Doin It Wrong!

2009-03-24T14:59:00.005-04:00

Reading the excellent page by Walt Crawford on unconferences and library camps on the PALINET Leadership Network site, it occurred to me that perhaps the attempts to define what is and isn't an unconference are kind of pointless. Questions like the following are often used to decide if an event truly fits into the unconference model:

Are there are invited speakers?
Is there is a registration fee (even a modest one)?
Are any attendees invited?

As Crawford notes, "the whole point is to provide a forum for participants to discuss what they want, when they want." I would definitely agree with that but would make a stronger argument for the element of participation by all attendees (or at least the possibility for participation) being the key element. What makes an unconference unique is the way it is engineered from the start to enable as much active participation by all attendees as possible. Maybe it would be better to think of any conference (traditional, virtual, unconference, whatever) and measure how participatory it is designed to be. Some events will fall on either end of the participation spectrum (from tons to none) while most others will be scattered in between (a bell curve).

When planning an event, the organizers should focus on just how participatory they want the event to be for attendees. Getting caught up in debates whether an event hews to the one true model of unconferences can be seen then as more of a distraction that doesn't serve attendees or organizers very well. Instead, the focus can be on to what extent the event will maximize the potential for all involved to share knowledge.

On a related note, if you happen to be going to Computers in Libraries next week, I'll be on a panel on March 31 (1:30 - 2:15 pm) with John Blyberg, Kathryn Greenill, and Steve Lawson (from whom I expect to learn a lot) on the subject of unconferences (details here).

Twitter as a Q&A Service

2009-03-13T15:12:00.008-04:00

Thanks to a Twitter message from Dana Longley (aka disobedientlib on Twitter) I learned today about an interesting attempt to turn a subset of Twitter messages into a Q&A service. AskOnTwitter searches for any tweet with the phrase "Does anyone know" and displays them on its home page. Typically, those messages are questions in which someone is using Twitter to query a broad audience. AskOnTwitter aggregates all those tweets and gives you a way to reply to them using your own Twitter account.

For example, on the home page of AskOnTwitter just now was this message:

Does anyone know how to update my Twitter and Facebook at the same time? Thanks! Jackie : )

Clicking that tweet opens a new page on AskOnTwitter for just that question that gives you a link to use to "Send an Answer." Clicking "Send an Answer" then opens the Twitter home page where you can enter your answer (the box where you type already has filled in the @ symbol and the Twitter account for the person who asked the question).

This seems like another opportunity for librarians to publicly offer their assistance in the tradition of the Slam the Boards project that was launched a year and a half ago.

Digital Dilemmas event on April 16

2009-03-13T11:13:00.002-04:00

My friend Jason Kucsma at METRO has helped put together what looks to be a great one-day event on digital libraries, which is described this way:

Digital Dilemmas is a day-long symposium addressing some of the key strategic issues facing libraries as they work through what we might understatedly refer to as a "digital transition period." Digital Dilemmas brings together nationally recognized experts who will: outline the primary challenges facing academic libraries in a digital world; provide an understanding of the digital information economy and its effect on scholarship; and suggest future opportunities for academic libraries. The symposium will provide librarians and library administrators with the opportunity to learn from leaders in the field and network with colleagues from the region working to address these challenges and seize potential opportunities.

I hope I can find a way to go myself. Getting there should be easy: it will be held four floors above me in the library building at Baruch College where I work.

Roving reference at Darien Library

2009-03-13T09:49:00.002-04:00

I'm excited to be attending a free, one-day event on the future of libraries at the Darien Library in a few weeks (details and sign up for the event are on this wiki). In addition to the Microsoft Surface computer that has been set up in the children's room, I am eager to see how the library runs its reference service, which was described in a Library Journal article ("New Library Opens in Darien, CT; First LEED Gold Building in Region," 12 January 2009) this way:

On the third floor, reference desks give way to a hybrid service model. Roving staffers are equipped with mini-laptops but can land as needed at small reference "touchdown spaces" for collaborative, side-by-side searching with patrons.

Reading this reminds me of something John Blyberg, the Assistant Director for Innovation and User Experience at the Darien Library, said some time ago about how library staff in the new building would handle situations where a book being sought by a patron was not in the library's collection: the laptop-equipped library staffer would place an order for the book right then and there. I can only imagine how positively patrons might react to such a level of customer service.

Reference Kiosk Using Skype

2009-03-05T09:50:00.003-05:00

Earlier this week, Chad Boeninger at Ohio University posted this nice video update of how his library's reference kiosk that uses Skype is working out.

Review of Mosio's Text a Librarian

2009-02-10T13:14:00.004-05:00

The January 2009 issue (Vol 10, No. 3) of The Charleston Advisor has a review by Joseph Murphy of Mosio's Text a Librarian service (paywall link...sorry). Murphy gives a thumbs down to the product that is being marketed to libraries as a solution for SMS reference services:

Mosio's beta Text A Librarian product does not live up to its claim of being “an easy to use text messaging solution that enables libraries to set up cost-effective SMS reference services” . This product is not cost effective for libraries, does not compare well with existing alternatives, is not able to integrate with existing library services, is not easy to use, does not facilitate feasible staffing models, is unable to adapt to future services and trends, and is not optimal for patrons. It is a good beta attempt but is not yet viable for libraries.

Murphy singles out the following problems:

Cost is higher than many other options for providing SMS reference service (minimum of $1398 a year)
Librarian web interface doesn't auto-refresh to show new queries
Email and IM notifications that library staff can get as alerts to new queries can't be used for sending a reply (library staffer must go back to web interface to compose reply)
Doesn't work for patrons using T-Mobile
No functionality for exporting interactions
URLs sent in text message replies from the library aren't live ones
A question thread can only have a maximum of four reply messages from the library

Is anyone out there actually using Mosio's service at their library now? What are your experiences like with the product?

SMS reference service at Bryant University

2009-02-10T09:34:00.006-05:00

The February 2009 issue of C&RL News (Vol. 70, No. 2) has an interesting article by Laura Kohl and Maura Keating on the SMS reference service that was launched at the Krupp Library at Bryant University. Most of the SMS reference services that I've heard about allow patrons to send their questions as text messages on their cell phones and then have the librarians compose their reply in some web-based interface; those replies are then passed back to the patron's cell phone as a text message. The service at Bryant University is a little different: the library purchased a smartphone with a QWERTY keyboard that librarians use to receive incoming text messages and to send their replies with. The person staffing the reference desk is the person also keeping an eye on the phone for new text message queries.

The authors of the article note that when planning a text message reference service they decided against going with a commercial service that would help them set it up and run it (such as Altarama's Reference by SMS because of cost concerns. They also looked into a hack that allows you to use AIM to send and receive text messages (see the Ask a Librarian page at the American University Library for an example of this); the library staff decided against this approach out of a concern that some students might be put off by the steps required to make it work. By purchasing a phone and signing up for a plan that included 200 messages a month, the library spent $340 to set everything up ($240 went toward the annual service plan).

Kohl and Keating report that "[m]ost questions that we received were academic or ready reference questions" (p. 106). Although there were some pranksters at the start of the service, it sounds like that problem has faded.

I like the idea of a library having a smartphone around to answer reference questions. If I could set up a service like this up at my school, I'd also use the phone for the telephone reference service. We have a large enough staff for our reference desk that we could monitor the text messages and phone calls from our office. Each day a different librarian would be assigned the phone and would take the texts and calls as they came in. If the librarian was on a call with a patron and needed to run to the stacks to look for something related to the patron's query, the librarian could just carry the phone with him/her. It would be great to advertise the service to students by just telling them about our "cell phone service" that allows you to text us, call us, or IM us from your phone. I recall that a few years ago, Michelle Jacobs spoke at ACRL in 2007 about using her smartphone somewhat in this manner (here's a PALINET Podcast in which she spoke about that project).

Trends in digital reference

2009-02-09T13:20:00.007-05:00

This post is meant to be just a quick list of notable things going on in digital reference in the last few years:

New IM/chat software options

Library H3lp (allows for collaborative IM reference service)
Open access software used by L-net's statewide service in Oregon and KnowItNow's statewide service in Ohio
Increased use of widgets for chat/IM (QuestionPoint's Qwidget, Meebo, Chatango, etc.)

Public sharing of reference interactions

L-net's Conversation Archive
Reference Extract
QuestionPoint's KnowledgeBase (see also related posts on QuestionPoint blog)

Outreach by reference librarians on answer boards

Answer Board Librarians

Growing interest in SMS reference (text message reference)

Mosio's Text A Librarian service
Southeastern University of Louisiana (a long-running service)
Yale University's Txt a Science Librarian and Maui Community College's Ask Ellen (related slide presentation)

Increase in collaborative/cooperative reference services

Collaborative Virtual Reference Symposium 2007
Library H3lp finally making it possible for IM software to be used for collaborative reference services
QuestionPoint service adds University of California libraries, New York Public Library, Brooklyn Public Library, and Queens Library to its cooperative reference service

What other trends did I miss?

Evaluating quality of answers in consortial chat reference

2009-01-21T12:58:00.002-05:00

The latest issue of College and Research Libraries (January 2009, volume 70, number 1) has an interesting article by Deborah L. Meert and Lisa M. Given ("Measuring Quality in Chat Reference Consortia: A Comparative Analysis of Responses to Users' Queries") reporting on a study that attempted to measure the quality of answers provided in a consortial chat reference service to one member library's patrons. The final version of the article isn't available online yet but you can read the preprint here (PDF).

The library where the chat service was studied is at the University of Alberta, which until a few years ago used 24/7 Reference and then QuestionPoint to provide a chat reference service available around the clock (they now use LiveHelp and staff the service themselves for limited hours each week). By looking closely at chat reference transcripts from sessions where University of Alberta patrons were helped, the authors of the article wanted to compare the quality of answers given by University of Alberta staff to the answers given by staff of other libraries in the chat reference consortia (i.e., non-University of Alberta staff).

The basic methodology of the authors was as follows:

select a representative pool of chat transcripts from the University of Alberta service
code each chat session as either answered or not answered
code the question type in each session (library user information; request for instruction; request for academic information; miscellaneous or non-library)
code each chat session as being handled by either U of A staff or non-U of A staff
for the subset of chat sessions that were coded as "not answered," code to indicate the reason why the questions weren't answered in real time (some were adequately answered after email followup with the patron)

I'll pass over detailing how the chat transcripts were selected and representative samples found. Instead, I want to offer some comments on the undiscussed historical context of the service studied, the sample set used, the coding methodology, the findings, and the implications. The authors say that they used transcripts from October 1 to April 30, but they don't mention what years that covers; they do say that the sessions used are from the first year of service but no launch dates for the service are provided. It would be useful to know exactly when the sessions took place, as there are some historical events that might help place the findings in notable context. I am pretty sure that the chat sessions took place when the University of Alberta was just using 24/7 Reference for its software; my college, too, was also a subscriber at the time, and I know that the number of other libraries in the academic consortial service grew rapidly. For the purposes of this article, it would be helpful for readers to know more about the consortia that was helping to provide answers to University of Albert patrons; specifically, how many other libraries were members of the consortia during the time period that the transcripts came from. How busy was the consortial service at the time? (The busier the service, the less likely that consortial librarians would be willing to expend a lot of time with any one patron and the more likely they would be to refer a question for e-mail follow up by the patron's home library).

Another notable detail is that during the time period that the Unversity of Alberta was in the 24/7 Reference academic cooperative service, they were the only library not in the United States. In their analysis of why non-answered questions weren't actually answered, the authors mention one possible reason as being a "cultural barrier" between librarian and patron, such as "not understanding the Canadian educational context" (80). It seems to me that the authors should have noted more explicity the reality that all the librarians from other libraries in the consortia worked at American colleges and universities and most if not all of the backup librarians employed by 24/7 Reference were also American.

Given that the University of Alberta, then, was the only Canadian institution in the consortia, I wonder just how representative these chat sessions are. I wish I could recall how many academic libraries were in 24/7 Reference when the University of Alberta was; if I had to guess, I would say at least fifty, maybe one hundred.

I did not see any mention of inter-rater reliability in the article. A note one way or the other ("yes, we did it" or "no, we didn't") would have helped me assess the validity of the coding of transcripts.

Another question that came to mind as I read this was whether assessing "answers" is the best way to evaluate a service. It is worth remembering that the study could have looked at how users perceived the quality of the service (do you feel like your question was answered? would you use the service again? would you recommend the service to someone? etc.) or how they acted in response to the service (how many repeat users were there). I'm not sure I know the answer, but it is a question to keep in mind as you read this article.

The authors found that U of A staff met the library's own reference standards 94% of time; non- U of A staff 82% of the time. They also discovered that U of A staff answered 89% of the questions in real-time (no followup or referrals were needed), while non-U of A did so only 69% of the time. Meert and Given say that for the consortial service to work at the U of A, the library there must:

provide adquate and easily accessible information to non-UofA staff (assuming that non-UofA staff use this information) that allowed them to answer most questions regarding library user information correctly, and in real time, this would decrease the number of questions not meeting the UofA reference management standards and would increase the number of questions anwered in real time by non-UofA staff. (82)

They go to say that this study "should provide further assurance that high standards of quality can be achieved by nonlocal staff in a chat reference consortium" (83) as long as "consortium staff...have the information they need to answer the most commonly asked types of questions, particularly the kind described in the 'Library User' question category" (82).

It's a shame that the University of Alberta no longer uses a consortial service, because I think it would really great to do this study again. Since the university stopped being in the consortia, it has undergone a number of notable changes. First, 24/7 Reference got acquired by OCLC and merged into its already existing QuestionPoint service. Second, QuestionPoint then built an all new chat software based on the 24/7 Reference software. Third, the consortia has grown considerably since the days that the University of Alberta was in it. I would love to know if service is better or worse now.

A factor that isn't addressed in this article is that while the staffing of chat reference at the University of Alberta may have been relatively stable, the consortia itself was constantly adding new libraries. With each new library in the consortia comes a bunch of librarians brand new to consortial chat reference; it takes quite a bit of experience to be able to provide reference in the consortial environment. Also, experienced staff already in the consortia may retire or take other jobs. It can be quite a challenge to make sure that everybody monitoring a consortial chat service is well-prepared to help patrons a libraries flung across the continent.

I must say that despite my comments, I think this is a good article and well-worth reading. As the authors point out, there has not been much work done yet in looking at how well patrons are helped in consortial chat reference services. This article offers an interesting methodology that I hope others will replicate.

Correction to earlier post about busiest day of the week

2009-01-20T09:41:00.004-05:00

I just realized that I made an error in the way I did computed averages in my post a few weeks ago detailing what was the busiest day of the week for my college's chat reference service. It looks like Tuesdays are actually the busiest day of the week for us, not Saturdays (just barely). The original post now contains a correction at the end with the revised statistics.

Widgets and chat reference discussion at ALA Midwinter

2009-01-15T13:58:00.001-05:00

If were going to ALA Midwinter this month, I would definitely check this discussion group's event out:

RUSA MARS Virtual Reference Discussion Group (VRDG)
Saturday, January 24, 2009, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
Hilton Garden Inn, Element Ballroom

Do You Fidget with a Widget?

Join your colleagues in learning how widgets are being used for virtual reference chat and IM-based reference services. What widget features are helpful? What improvements are needed? Thinking about adding a widget to your library’s Web pages?

Kathleen Kern and David Ward will present an introduction to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s IM Collaborator software. Discussion of widgetry and all things virtual reference will follow.

Come and participate in a lively discussion. Hope to see you there!

The Virtual Reference Discussion Group is sponsored by the Reference and User Services Association [RUSA] Machine-Assisted Reference Section [MARS].

Most popular times of day for chat reference at Baruch

2009-01-12T11:48:00.004-05:00

In my last post, a commenter asked for details on what hours of the day were most popular for chat. Here is a list of the hours of the day showing the changes by hour of the for all 1,890 chat sessions requested in 2008 on the Baruch College service:

12 am - 1 am, 52
1 am - 2 am, 32
2 am - 3 am, 25
3 am - 4 am, 9
4 am - 5 am, 4
5 am - 6 am, 2
6 am - 7 am, 1
7 am - 8 am, 9
8 am - 9 am, 40
9 am - 10 am, 68
10 am - 11 am, 124
11 am - 12 pm, 128
12 pm - 1 pm, 143
1 pm - 2 pm, 148
2 pm - 3 pm, 148
3 pm - 4 pm, 128
4 pm - 5 pm' 128
5 pm - 6 pm, 130
6 pm - 7 pm, 109
7 pm - 8 pm, 98
8 pm - 9 pm, 117
9 pm - 10 pm, 95
10 pm - 11 pm, 91
11 pm - 12 am, 61

Here is that same list sorted to show hours from busiest to slowest:

1 pm - 2 pm, 148
2 pm - 3 pm, 148
12 pm - 1 pm, 143
5 pm - 6 pm, 130
11 am - 12 pm, 128
3 pm - 4 pm, 128
4 pm - 5 pm, 128
10 am - 11 am, 124
8 pm - 9 pm, 117
6 pm - 7 pm, 109
7 pm - 8 pm, 98
9 pm - 10 pm, 95
10 pm - 11 pm, 91
9 am - 10 am, 68
11 pm - 12 am, 61
12 am - 1 am, 52
8 am - 9 am, 40
1 am - 2 am, 32
2 am - 3 am, 25
3 am - 4 am, 9
7 am - 8 am, 9
4 am - 5 am, 4
5 am - 6 am, 2
6 am - 7 am, 1

I also took those numbers and aggregated them into four six-hour blocks to see what part of the day generally is busiest:

Morning (6 am - 12 pm), 370 chats requested, 20% of total
Afternoon (12 pm - 6 pm), 825 chats requested, 44% of total
Evening (6 pm - 12 am), 571 chats requested, 30% of total
Late Night/Early Morning (12 am - 6 am), 124 chats requested, 7% of total

It is worth keeping in mind that Baruch College is a commuter school. Most of our students work part- or full-time, which may make our numbers different from what you might see for a chat service at residential college.

Chat service at Baruch College shows increasing use

2009-01-12T09:14:00.003-05:00

As I continue to crunch last year's numbers from my college's chat reference service, I thought I would note here that the number of chat sessions requested has gone up slowly over the past three years (which is when we started using the flash-based QuestionPoint software and had access to new data points like "chat sessions requested" and "chat sessions accepted."). Here are the statistics:

2006: Number of chat sessions requested = 1722
2007: Number of chat sessions requested = 1757 (a 2% increase from previous year)
2008: Number of chat sessions requested = 1890 (an 8% increase from previous year)

I don't have any theories about why the numbers have been going up. I'm digging through old spreadsheets I made from years ago to see if any can find the comparable data from the earlier years of our chat service (2001-2006). The older software we used to use (first HumanClick, then 24/7 Reference) did not tell us how many sessions were requested; instead, they only offered how many sessions were answered, which is a different number. With HumanClick (which we used from 2001-2002), we only offered the service ten hours a week. Comparing annual data from recent years with this older data does not really make sense, as the current service allows patrons to chat around the clock.

With 24/7 Reference and QuestionPoint, the data about the number of sessions answered does not jibe with the HumanClick-era data, as the latter was used for a chat service that just covered our college alone. Once we started using 24/7 Reference and then QuestionPoint software, we found ourselves answering chat sessions not just on the Baruch College queues but also a growing cooperative of academic libraries that used the same software. Our librarians found themselves busier than ever on their two-hour shifts answering questions from Baruch patrons and those at other colleges. One thing is certain though about data from those early years; going from a service of ten hours a week to an around-the-clock cooperative chat service dramatically boosted the number of chat sessions requested on the Baruch service; suddenly our service, backed up by an army of capable librarians at colleges across the country, was able to help all those students with questions on weekends and weekday evenings, times that we never could have staffed a chat service on our own.

Thursdays are slow for chat?

2009-01-09T16:18:00.005-05:00

I've been doing a lot of number crunching for the chat reference service here at Baruch College and for the five other colleges in CUNY that share a QuestionPoint subscription with us (Borough of Manhattan Community College, Brooklyn College, CUNY Graduate Center, Hunter College, and John Jay College). I was just looking over numbers for Baruch's service and discovered that Thursdays, of all days, are the slowest days for our service.

Here's the data with the day of the week, followed by the number of chat sessions requested on just the Baruch College service, the percent of all requests for the month (215 for all of November), and the rank of that day of the week:

Monday: 32 chats, 15%, 3
Tuesday: 40 chats, 19%, 2
Wednesday: 28 chats, 13%, 5
Thursday: 18 chats, 8%, 7
Friday: 25 chats, 12%, 6
Saturday: 42 chats, 20%, 1
Sunday: 30 chats, 14%, 4

I realize that at least one Thursday was Thanksgiving, but before doing the analysis I didn't expect that Thursday would be our slowest day of the week. Our reference desk is busiest on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so I figured that would hold true for chat reference. I would pull a larger data set to see if this finding holds true across a longer time span if it wasn't so difficult to do this kind of analysis. The QuestionPoint reporting tools don't record what day of the week a chat took place on. I had to export the daily chat session activity into a spreadsheet and manually type in the day of the week for all 215 sessions. (I assume that those with fancier spreadsheet/database skills could make this work of assigning days to dates automated in some way.)

CORRECTION (20 January 2009): Whoops! I recently realized that I didn't use an equal number of days of the week when running my report. The month I analyzed (November 2008) has four Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays and five Saturdays and Sundays. By taking the average number of chats per weekday, I made the mistake of taking the average of five Saturdays and five Sundays. If I drop the numbers for one Saturday and one Sunday, then it turns out that Tuesday is the busiest day of week, not Saturday, which makes a bit more sense to me. Here is the corrected breakdown:

Monday: 32 chats, 15% of total, 3rd busiest day

Tuesday: 40 chats, 19% of total, 1st busiest day

Wednesday: 28 chats, 28, 13% of total, 4th busiest day

Thursday: 18 chats, 9% of total, 7th busiest day

Friday: 25 chats, 12% of total, 6th busiest day

Saturday: 39 chats, 19% of total, 2nd busiest day

Sunday: 26 chats, 13% of total, 5th busiest day

The Free Rider Problem and Chat Cooperatives

2009-01-08T16:27:00.003-05:00

As an experiment, I decided to try doing a video post. The subject is equity among member libraries in chat reference cooperatives.

Commenting on Scapes and Reference Extract

2008-11-19T09:05:00.002-05:00

I've been adding a number of comments to David Lankes' recent post on the connection between Scapes and Reference Extract. Rather than repeat those comments here, I'll just link to them here.