SMS reference service at Bryant University
The February 2009 issue of C&RL News (Vol. 70, No. 2) has an interesting article by Laura Kohl and Maura Keating on the SMS reference service that was launched at the Krupp Library at Bryant University. Most of the SMS reference services that I've heard about allow patrons to send their questions as text messages on their cell phones and then have the librarians compose their reply in some web-based interface; those replies are then passed back to the patron's cell phone as a text message. The service at Bryant University is a little different: the library purchased a smartphone with a QWERTY keyboard that librarians use to receive incoming text messages and to send their replies with. The person staffing the reference desk is the person also keeping an eye on the phone for new text message queries.
The authors of the article note that when planning a text message reference service they decided against going with a commercial service that would help them set it up and run it (such as Altarama's Reference by SMS because of cost concerns. They also looked into a hack that allows you to use AIM to send and receive text messages (see the Ask a Librarian page at the American University Library for an example of this); the library staff decided against this approach out of a concern that some students might be put off by the steps required to make it work. By purchasing a phone and signing up for a plan that included 200 messages a month, the library spent $340 to set everything up ($240 went toward the annual service plan).
Kohl and Keating report that "[m]ost questions that we received were academic or ready reference questions" (p. 106). Although there were some pranksters at the start of the service, it sounds like that problem has faded.
I like the idea of a library having a smartphone around to answer reference questions. If I could set up a service like this up at my school, I'd also use the phone for the telephone reference service. We have a large enough staff for our reference desk that we could monitor the text messages and phone calls from our office. Each day a different librarian would be assigned the phone and would take the texts and calls as they came in. If the librarian was on a call with a patron and needed to run to the stacks to look for something related to the patron's query, the librarian could just carry the phone with him/her. It would be great to advertise the service to students by just telling them about our "cell phone service" that allows you to text us, call us, or IM us from your phone. I recall that a few years ago, Michelle Jacobs spoke at ACRL in 2007 about using her smartphone somewhat in this manner (here's a PALINET Podcast in which she spoke about that project).
posted by Stephen Francoeur @ 9:34 AM
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2 Comments:
Hi Stephen,
In full disclosure, I work for Mosio’s Text a Librarian service. We applaud all librarians and libraries who are seeking out ways to incorporate SMS/text message reference services.
That said, we have spoken with hundreds of librarians regarding SMS reference services (we recently conducted over 200 live demos at ALA Midwinter) and found that the 2 most resounding issues of importance are patron privacy and librarian controls.
Patron Privacy
Internally at Mosio, we believe if you can see a patron's phone number, other people can as well. The use of phones (iPhone, BlackBerry, etc) or SMS-to-IM Hacks (AIM / Google) for reference both expose and openly store patron phone numbers, creating risk for patrons and libraries.
Librarian Controls
We say "patrons text, librarians type." While the numbers are growing, the fact remains that many librarians do not text and are not comfortable using a mobile device to answer reference questions. Furthermore, the use of IM hacks or cell phones eliminates any opportunity for automatic archiving, statistical reporting & collaboration between librarians.
In an effort to avoid shameless self promotion, I have not listed the ways in which Mosio’s Text a Librarian solves these issues. Instead, we invite people to visit our website and sign-up for a live demonstration at www.textalibrarian.com.
Thank you for your time,
Jamieson
The NYU Libraries are also offering an SMS reference service in a manner that is very similar to Bryant University. We made the decision to use an actual phone for essentially the same reasons that Stephen explains in this post. The service is getting close to one year old and we've been quite happy with it. We receive a lot of reference and directional questions, along with quite a bit of positive feedback from our users.
I'm most interested in responding to the Mosio rep's comments about privacy and "librarian controls." I feel that the privacy concerns are overstated. First of all, while we are saving our transcripts, we are not saving phone numbers and the messages are automatically deleted from our phone after a certain period of time. Secondly, the service is voluntary. It is entirely up to our users to add us as a contact and initiate a reference transaction. Finally, academic libraries have been keeping track of patron information such as phone numbers, mailing addresses, and email addresses for a very long time. Having someone's phone number for a temporary period of time hardly seems invasive, especially considering that we don't usually know anything else about the person, other than that he/she is a library user. We frequently take people's email addresses during reference desk interactions, in order to enable follow-up communication. Modes of communication are only going to proliferate and if we want people to use our services, we need to make them available in multiple venues.
As for the comments related to "librarian controls," I also feel this is overstated. I can say with confidence that very many of my librarian colleagues are proficient in the act of sending and receiving text messages. If not, most are willing to learn.
We need to develop services that are useful, worthwhile, and relevant to our user communities, without being limited by an overly-generalized notion that "librarians do not text and are not comfortable using a mobile device to answer reference questions." We should certainly be trying to develop affordable web-based options, but in the meantime, I actually feel that there are several benefits to using an actual phone. Setting up such a service is incredibly simple and enables librarians and users to communicate in kind. If there are librarians who are new to text messaging, this can be a great way to experience something that is by now second nature to so many users. We should absolutely not shy away from such opportunities.
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