Steve Coffman/Linda Arret article now online
Thanks to Bernie Sloan for his e-mail posting on Dig_Ref and Web4Lib alerting everyone to the online posting of the second part of article by Steve Coffman and Linda Arret in Searcher magazine. I've now had a chance to read the piece myself. It's a very thoughtful piece that anyone who is doing chat reference or considering chat reference should read.
As you can see from some of my earlier postings on this blog, I've got some gripes with with quality of reference my library's users get from our chat cooperative. While I am not ready to recommend we drop chat from our services here, I do think there is much work to be done in improving the quality of the chat service we offer.
I also like Steve and Linda's suggestion to consider improving other forms of remote reference (specifically, telephone and e-mail reference). Our telephone reference service is staffed at the reference desk. Like many other libraries, we give short shrift to telephone reference calls. Our policy is not to do more than answer basic policy questions and to do title lookups. If a user on the phone wants us to do a subject search for them or to instruct them in the details of searching a particular database, we typically tell the user to come in to the library or use the chat service for that kind of help.
It would be nice to have a phone system set up so that telephone reference calls could get routed to librarians in their offices, where we might have more time to give the user the in-depth assistance they often need.
Our e-mail service seems pretty good, but I wonder if we would be able to handle an even faster, guaranteed turnaround time. Right now, our posted policy states that "reference librarians will respond within 24 hours of your initial submission, except on weekends, holidays, and those Fridays when the library is closed." Maybe we'd win over more users if we told them we'd get back in a few hours if the question comes in between 9-5 weekdays and if we could find a way to answer the questions that come in on weekends on the same day.
So many ideas to explore, so many projects, so little time...sigh.
posted by Stephen Francoeur @ 1:53 PM
3 Comments
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3 Comments:
I'm interested in your comment re: dissatisfaction with your library's chat cooperative. Our library started chat reference on our own about two years ago with 24/7 and it has worked pretty well. But now that they've been bought out, the Powers that Be are pushing for cooperative reference through MyWebLibrarian or another co-op chat service. Can I ask what some of the negatives and positives have been, specifically? Thanks.
My biggest complaint with doing chat cooperatively is that it's hard to answer questions whose referent is some piece of local knowledge. For example, here in our library, we have a lot of problems with the printing network that the public PCs are connected to. There are just so many little issues about how deal with different kinds of problems with the printers. We have a hard enough time dealing with them at the reference desk; imagine if you are a librarian at another school and you get one of these printer questions from our students. While we do have web pages that coop librarians can refer to that explain a number of services and problems that are unique to our library, it's really hard to capture all that information. Another example: students log in to chat and ask about all manner of academic policy questions and often use acronyms that only have meaning for Baruch College staff.
So that's one problem: how can a librarian at another institution learn enough about the idiosyncrasies of another institution in the coop. There's just too much information that falls under the category of "local knoweldge" to be able to capture it all in some sort of web page or database available for use by coop librarians.
Another problem is that coop librarians often ignore basic policies of how to work with patrons from other college's libraries. For example, one rule is that if you are helping a patron from another college, don't recommend a database that the patron's library doesn't have but your library does. And if you do recommend a database, make sure you refer to it the way it is listed on the library web site for the patron's institution, not yours. Although we subscribe to many databases from Gale, we don't list them as Gale or Infotrac databases; we just use the specific database name (Biography Resource Center, Literature Resource Center, etc.) But time and again I see librarians tell students to try using "Infotrac." Then the poor student goes to our library web site and sees no listing for "Infotrac."
Don't get me wrong. I'm a big fan of having a chat cooperative. But the keys for making it work well (and I'm not sure how well it works for us), are doing extensive and ongoing training with any librarians participating in the coop, having some sort of feedback loop to follow up on chat sessions gone wrong, and making sure that all libraries who belong have extremely informative web sites that clearly explain every policy and service that you can possibly think of (our library web site isn't so great in this last respect).
stephen,
i can never remember my blogger login, so anonymous it is.
think about re-examining what you can hope to acheive in dealing with local policy questions. a big part of chat reference, and more important than answering questions to me (at least for the moment), is making people aware of the library and its services and getting them to come in, either in person or through the website. you may not be able to find my library's ILL policy, but you can find out who to call, where to ask, and still help me.
-caleb
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