Benefits of cooperative chat services
Today I was doing some number crunching of data from sample weeks of chat reference service here at the library at Baruch College. I've been looking only at sample weekly data from the spring and fall semesters for the past few years that we've been part of the 24/7 Reference Academic Cooperative. In so doing, I turned up an interesting insight: for every one non-Baruch patron (i.e., a patron who is affiliated with another library in the cooperative) that Baruch librarians help, four Baruch patrons get helped by librarians from other libraries in the cooperative. In short, there's a huge benefit to being in a cooperative service. Our library is getting far more in return out of the cooperative than we have to put in.
Librarians here at Baruch monitor the cooperative service ten hours a week (Monday to Friday from 10 AM to 12 noon). During those hours, we are more likely to be helping coop patrons (about one-quarter of our chat sessions are with Baruch patrons, the other three-quarters are with coop patrons). In exchange for agreeing to cover the coop service a mere two hours a day (weekdays), our library can be assured that the remaining twenty-two hours of each weekday (and the entire weekend, too) are covered by the coop.
In truth, we are actually covering the coop service twice as much as we are actually required to. At the moment, 24/7 Reference only requires libraries in the coop to agree to cover the service five hours a week. Now that 24/7 Reference has merged into Questpoint, I'm not sure what the new time commitment might be. Given that we've already been covering it for ten hours a week since we joined in July 2003, it wouldn't be a problem if the minimum time commitment required by the coop increased somewhat (we're already doing more than we have to).
posted by Stephen Francoeur @ 1:15 PM
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3 Comments:
Are the Baruch users who get other librarians from other institutions as satisfied as when they get Baruch librarians?
We're in a statewide co-op where university users are sometimes frustrated that other librarians cannot help them with university-licensed databases.
That's a very good question about how the users feel when they realize they're connected to a librarian who isn't affiliated with their library. I'm going to take a few days to compose a reply to that as a new post, but for now, I'll say that we get a wide range of responses. From the most common to the least common, the responses are: curiousity (users want to know where the librarian is and then often chat with them about that); indifference (many users are pragmatists as long as they feel they're getting good enough help); and outrage (especially if the librarian really fumbles the ball in the interaction). If I had to assign percentages from a hugely subjective process of recollection of what's happened over the years in our chat service (and I should mention that for the purposes of keeping reference statistics I have to read every single chat session that our librarians at Baruch have and that coop librarians have with Baruch patrons), I'd say curiosity was the response 45% of the time, indifference 40% of the time, and outrage 15% of the time. Don't quote me on those statistics. I'll put more into my response in a new post in the next week or so.
Thanks for responding to me with a new post. I did come back earlier in the day to check for a response, and left when I didn't find one.
The perils of using Bloglines, I guess. I like your solution, but am sorry for the extra trouble it puts you through. Short answer is intriguing, and am looking forward to the longer post. - Daniel in Alaska
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