Going public

One of the tantalizing possibilities of digital reference services is that there is a possibility of getting additional mileage from the artifacts of the reference interaction (a transcript in a chat reference service or the email exchange in an email reference service). Some libraries and services have found ways to dump the artifacts (in raw form or edited down for readibility's sake) into knowledgebases that librarians or patrons might be able to search. If those knowledgebases are set up so they can be crawled by search engines, then the hard and usually invisible work of librarians to connect patrons with information can be surfaced in a very public manner (i.e., theoretically, the interactions could show up in search engine results).

L-net, the statewide chat reference service in Oregon, has just started going down this public road by putting chat transcripts online for those patrons who have approved such use when logging in. The form on the L-net login screen has a "Sharing" section where patrons choose between the option to "Share my question and answer" or "Keep my session confidential." Below the radio buttons where patrons choose whether to share or not is this notice:

We're looking for a few examples of questions and answers to share on our website, but we need your permission to do it. See our privacy policy for more details.

The first chat session that a patron opted in for sharing is now online. I can see a lot of value in doing this:

• People who might want to use the service can see what chat looks like and what kind of help they might get if they elect to use it.
• People can actually see the work of librarians; while the concept of our library's collections may be somewhat easy for the public to envision, our reference services are probably not that well known among the public ("You can ask for help at the library?")
• A searchable archive of question and answer pairs can be easily created.