New article on collaborative digital reference service

There's an insightful article in the latest issue of College and Research Libraries (Vol. 66, No. 5) detailing the experiences of the libraries at the University of Illinois at Chicago with their digital reference services. Titled "Quantifying Cooperation: Collaborative Digital Reference Service in the Large Academic Library," the article has lots of choice nuggets, such as:

E-mail was used most frequently for submitting questions. The breakdown within user groups shows that faculty used e-mail 77.1 percent of the time, visitors 71.7 percent of the time, and graduate students 62.2 percent of the time. Perhaps not surprisingly, undergraduates showed a clear preference for chat, submitting 66.5 percent of their questions via this methods. (p. 449)

We haven't tried to do a study like that here at Baruch College, but we do know that here too graduate students tend to be heavier users of e-mail reference and undergrads fans of chat.

The article is available online at the ACRL web site to ACRL members and in full text in Wilson's Education Full Text (it's not there yet, though, and I'm not sure how quickly Wilson loads current issues).