Refresher training for experienced chat reference staff

Last week I ran a refresher training workshop for my colleagues at the six CUNY schools that share a QuestionPoint subscription for their chat and email reference services. Although I have done introductory training for QuestionPoint a number of times over the past five years, this was the first time I had attempted to do a workshop that was meant to focus on policies, procedures, and best practices in chat reference service.

The two-hour workshop was divided up into three parts, one of which seemed to resonate the most with the attendees. First, I wanted the attendees to practice being a patron in chat reference. I had all the attendees log in as patrons with me serving as the harried librarian trying to accept nineteen simultaneous chat sessions (not a recommended practice, by the way). My goal was to give the attendees a better sense of empathy for what the patron's interface looked like and how it worked.

One of the great challenges of chat reference is that you usually don't have a good idea of what your patron is doing, feeling, or looking at as you try to help them. At the reference desk, you have at least some visual information about the patron (their posture, their facial expressions, their mannerisms, can all reveal useful information that can guide the observant reference librarian). It should not be too hard for most reference librarians at a desk to understand the basics of what it is like to be on the other side of the desk. In chat, though, we don't see our patrons, we don't really have a good feel for what they look like when they are interacting with us, limitations that I believe make it harder to empathize with them. Without that empathy for the patron, a sense of what the world looks like to them, librarians are going to have a harder time engaging in a meaningful and rich manner during the chat session. So this exercise in the training, then, was merely a baby step to help the attendees get in the habit of thinking about what their patrons' world looks like during chat sessions.

This part of the training did not go so well, though, for several reasons. The technology was not really up the task: my QuestionPoint chat reference monitor flashed and blinked once I had loaded nineteen simultaneous chat sessions, limiting me from interacting much with the attendees who had logged on as patrons. I probably should have paired attendees off and had them chat with each other, with each pair of librarians taking turns to play librarian and patron. I also think that limited interaction I was able to have with my nineteen "patrons" did not give them enough of a sense of what the patron's experience is like. Perhaps next time I will have one person come to computer connected to the projector in the classroom, logon to a real academic library chat service in the QuestionPoint cooperative, and ask a real question. As a group, then, we could all see the patron interface and see what it is really like to get help in the QuestionPoint environment.

The next part of the training was an attempt to get the attendees to think about strategies for conducting a reference interview. In the chat environment, asking questions can be really tedious: it takes time to type out all those open-ended questions that you need to ask and you can often sense from the patron's cursory replies to you that the patron is disinclined (for a number of reasons) to disclose a reasonable amount of information about his/her question. First, I asked the attendees to open up Word on their computers and begin typing out the questions they'd likely ask in response to a patron's initial chat question, "I need information on globalization."

After five minutes of having attendees compose their replies, I decided to use a simple chat box (from Gabbly) embedded into the staff wiki created for the CUNY librarians who do chat reference; this chat box would serve as the means by which we would discuss reference interview strategies. I chose a chat box over the QuestionPoint interface because I wanted something that would allow anyone in the room to jump in to the session to be the librarian (everyone had the Gabbly chat box in the wiki page loaded on their screens). One librarian pretended to be a student asking for "information on globalization." Several librarians took turns typing in their reference interview questions in the chat box and interacting with the student. As the librarians typed their questions in, they explained why they asked what they asked and the other attendees added their suggestions as well.

I think the next time I try to focus on reference interview skills, I may try a different approach that ensures that everyone gets a chance to explain their approach in eliciting information from the patron. I will also want review with the attendees some of the research that discusses best practices for reference interviews.

The third part of the training session was the most successful portion of the workshop. I found three chat transcripts from our service, stripped out all personally identifiable information about the librarian and the patron, and distributed copies to the attendees. We then read each transcript aloud, with one person reading the patron's messages and another doing the librarian's messages. I encourage the attendees to interrupt at any point with comments and questions, which my colleagues enthusiastically did. We had the richest conversations of the day when we were talking about these chat interactions. The lively discussions reminded me exactly of a similar situation several years ago at a Virtual Reference Special Interest Group meeting that I facilitated at which real transcripts were similarly read and analyzed.

As we read the transcripts at the refresher training, the conversations about what the librarian had typed led to discussions about language and tone of chat communication; reference interview skills; policies and procedures in the cooperative; and lesser known features of the QuestionPoint software. It felt like almost everyone in the room spoke up during this portion of the training, something that was not the case in the earlier parts of the workshop. I think that from now on whenever I do chat reference training, I will incorporate transcript readings into the activities.