Best response so far to critiques of VR

There's been a flurry of postings on Dig_Ref and Web4Lib lately about Nancy Kalikow Maxwell's article ("The Seven Deadly Sings of Library Technology") from American Libraries (September 2004). In this article, she presents a slipshod argument about why virtual reference is bunk. Karen Schneider has written the best critique of that article so far and posted it on her blog.

Free! Feeds for free!

I've beefed up the feeds available for my site. I've added links so that you can subscribe to the Atom feed, add the feed to your Bloglines account, or subscribe to the XML feed. Take your pick.

Congratulations to a colleague

Congratulations to my colleague, Lisa Ellis, here in the Newman Library at Baruch College, for being approved yesterday by the library department for tenure here. Lisa and I worked together to launch the library's e-mail and chat reference services in early 2001. We've also done many presentations together, including one a few years ago at IFLA when it was held in Boston.

Lisa wrote a good article that was recently published in Reference Services Review: "Approaches to Teaching Through Digital Reference" (Volume 32, Number 2, p. 103-119). In the five years that I've worked with her, she and I have enjoyed many discussions and debates about instruction and digital reference. I'm glad to hear that she'll be here for many more such conversations.

Steve Coffman/Linda Arret article now online

Thanks to Bernie Sloan for his e-mail posting on Dig_Ref and Web4Lib alerting everyone to the online posting of the second part of article by Steve Coffman and Linda Arret in Searcher magazine. I've now had a chance to read the piece myself. It's a very thoughtful piece that anyone who is doing chat reference or considering chat reference should read.

As you can see from some of my earlier postings on this blog, I've got some gripes with with quality of reference my library's users get from our chat cooperative. While I am not ready to recommend we drop chat from our services here, I do think there is much work to be done in improving the quality of the chat service we offer.

I also like Steve and Linda's suggestion to consider improving other forms of remote reference (specifically, telephone and e-mail reference). Our telephone reference service is staffed at the reference desk. Like many other libraries, we give short shrift to telephone reference calls. Our policy is not to do more than answer basic policy questions and to do title lookups. If a user on the phone wants us to do a subject search for them or to instruct them in the details of searching a particular database, we typically tell the user to come in to the library or use the chat service for that kind of help.

It would be nice to have a phone system set up so that telephone reference calls could get routed to librarians in their offices, where we might have more time to give the user the in-depth assistance they often need.

Our e-mail service seems pretty good, but I wonder if we would be able to handle an even faster, guaranteed turnaround time. Right now, our posted policy states that "reference librarians will respond within 24 hours of your initial submission, except on weekends, holidays, and those Fridays when the library is closed." Maybe we'd win over more users if we told them we'd get back in a few hours if the question comes in between 9-5 weekdays and if we could find a way to answer the questions that come in on weekends on the same day.

So many ideas to explore, so many projects, so little time...sigh.

Transferring chats in a cooperative service

This is a bit of low-level rant about working in a cooperative environment. One of the beautiful things about the software we use for our chat service is that it allows you to see what librarians are logged in to the system and if they are currently chatting with a user. The software even indicates what library that user is affiliated with (i.e., what library web site they went to and clicked the "chat" button on). So I can see, for example, that a Boston College librarian is chatting with a patron who came in via the University of Utah service.

One of the agreements by which we are supposed to abide as librarians working cooperatively in this chat service is that if we get a patron who is affiliated with another library, we are supposed to see if there is a librarian online from that other library and transfer the call over to them. If yes, then we transfer; if no, they we try to do our best and, if needed, refer the question to the library's e-mail refernce service for follow up. The logic of transferring calls is reasonable: a librarian will usually know their own library's policies, resources, services, and user population better than any librarian elsewhere in the cooperative.

But what disturbs me is how often librarians in the cooperative help our patrons without bothering to check to see if one of us here from Baruch is online and available for a transfer. In fact, this just happened to me today. There are a number of reasons why transfers don't take place when in theory they could:

• the librarian from the other library forgot to check to see if someone was online
• the librarian from the other library felt they could handle the question
• the user told the librarian not to transfer them (some users request a transfer, others tell the librarian not to bother)
• the librarian from the other library has forgotten the cooperative policy about transfers or how to do it using the chat software

Of course, it would help if our software did a better job of routing chat users. When a user from Baruch initiaties a chat, there is no guarantee that I will automatically get that Baruch user's chat routed to me. The reason behind this software limitation is likely way over my head. Because of this problem with routing, having a good policy for transferring users that is followed by members of the cooperative is really important. There...that's my rant. I'm not sure I feel better, though.

The weakest link

As I've been writing a RFP for a much-needed redesign of our library web site, I've been thinking about how crucial a library's web presence really is for a chat service. Our site was last overhauled six years ago, and most of us who work in our library are well aware of the problem areas in the site. I'm hopeful that a redesign will smooth out these rough spots (and fill gaping holes) on our library site.

As much as I can, I've been trying to put myself in the mind of our users to see where they are likely being confused or misdirected on our web site. When our users come to the site now to take care of common tasks--such finding a textbook on reserve, renewing the loan period for a book, searching for articles on a specific topic--they are often stymied by a web site design that baffles them (things are not where they expect them to be). If the user is in the library, they may stop by the reference desk for help (who knows how many never bother to ask...wish I knew!) Some even use the chat or e-mail service while in the library. If the user isn't in the library, they will often call the reference desk or use our e-mail and chat services.

Obviously, if the site was better designed, we might see fewer users with questions; they'd be able to figure things out for themselves more often. But we need a better site also because when they log in to our chat service, they are likely to be connected with a librarian who is at another college in the chat cooperative we belong to. If there is no Baruch librarian monitoring chat that the call can be transferred to, then the library from the other school is on their own. I've seen dozens and dozens of transcripts from chat sessions where the librarian was unable to find on our web site the information they needed to help the user. As more libraries join chat cooperatives (and I hope they do, as it is a great way to share the cost and staffing burdens), more of us are going to realize how important it is to have an up-to-date, user-friendly, web site that details ALL services and resources that a library offers (including the seemingly picayune ones, such as where is the stapler in the library, or the fax machine, or a typewriter, etc.)

As my colleagues and I here at Baruch College redesign our web site, we will be thinking not just of our main user population (Baruch students, faculty, and staff) but also those librarians in our chat cooperative who rely on our site to help them help our students. I hope we make things a little better for the librarians in the cooperative, and, I hope they in turn will do the same with their library web sites.