Transferring chats in a cooperative service

This is a bit of low-level rant about working in a cooperative environment. One of the beautiful things about the software we use for our chat service is that it allows you to see what librarians are logged in to the system and if they are currently chatting with a user. The software even indicates what library that user is affiliated with (i.e., what library web site they went to and clicked the "chat" button on). So I can see, for example, that a Boston College librarian is chatting with a patron who came in via the University of Utah service.

One of the agreements by which we are supposed to abide as librarians working cooperatively in this chat service is that if we get a patron who is affiliated with another library, we are supposed to see if there is a librarian online from that other library and transfer the call over to them. If yes, then we transfer; if no, they we try to do our best and, if needed, refer the question to the library's e-mail refernce service for follow up. The logic of transferring calls is reasonable: a librarian will usually know their own library's policies, resources, services, and user population better than any librarian elsewhere in the cooperative.

But what disturbs me is how often librarians in the cooperative help our patrons without bothering to check to see if one of us here from Baruch is online and available for a transfer. In fact, this just happened to me today. There are a number of reasons why transfers don't take place when in theory they could:

• the librarian from the other library forgot to check to see if someone was online
• the librarian from the other library felt they could handle the question
• the user told the librarian not to transfer them (some users request a transfer, others tell the librarian not to bother)
• the librarian from the other library has forgotten the cooperative policy about transfers or how to do it using the chat software

Of course, it would help if our software did a better job of routing chat users. When a user from Baruch initiaties a chat, there is no guarantee that I will automatically get that Baruch user's chat routed to me. The reason behind this software limitation is likely way over my head. Because of this problem with routing, having a good policy for transferring users that is followed by members of the cooperative is really important. There...that's my rant. I'm not sure I feel better, though.