Planning for the future of California's statewide reference service

Sarah Houghton-Jan recently remarked on the lack of discussion over recently released reports on the future of state-funded reference services in California. Check out her comments and the documents she links to.

Collaborative email reference at Queens Library

For those of you who aren't from New York, it may be news that the city actually has three separate public library systems:

• New York Public Library (with branches in Manhattan, Staten Island, and the Bronx)
• Brooklyn Public Library (with branches only in Brooklyn)
• Queens Library (with branches only in Queens)

All three systems are doing wonderful things despite by underfunded for years. A few days ago, while sitting on a panel to discuss the changing reference landscape, I heard from Donna Ciampi at Queens Library about a really interesting collaborative email reference service for patrons who speak one of the many Chinese dialects. The service is staffed by librarians at Queens Library and the Shanghai Library(!!!) If you go the Chinese language page on the Queens Library site, look for the link for CORS, which takes you to a page with a form (on the Shanghai Library site) for submitting your question.

My goal at the panel was to explain how the collaborative chat reference service in QuestionPoint works and to encourage my audience to consider collaborative reference services an important, growing trend in the way libraries can meet the information needs of users. I noted how hard member libraries in QuestionPoint's academic cooperative work together, but I must admit here to being amazed by the effort on the part of the librarians at the Queens Library and the Shanghai Library to establish this joint project.

QuestionPoint's academic cooperative is limited to college libraries in the United States at the moment. Australian libraries that use QuestionPoint on their own have so far resisted joining the cooperative. I have heard, though, that a group of public libraries in the United Kingdom are planning to join QuestionPoint's public library cooperative soon. I hope that in the coming years we see more and more reference partnerships like the one between the Queens Library and the Shanghai Library.

(Not) connecting search engine users to library resources

Now that the many of the content kings we work with in the library world (publishers, aggregators, etc.) have begun to expose their treasures to the spidering efforts of Google et al., we're beginning to see searchers encounter this content locked down tight. If someone finds a great article on JSTOR, say, from a Google search (or more likely, a Google Scholar search), how can we in the library world help connect that person to the article. Here are the usual options:

1. if the user is in the library itself (or on a college campus) IP authentication lets them right in if the user's library is a subscriber to that content
2. if the user is savvy enough to have bookmarked their link resolver or, even better, downloaded and correctly installed a bookmarklet like OCLC's OpenURL Referrer (Firefox only) that helpfully provides a "find it" link next to the resource listing in search results, then the user can navigate the treacherous shoals between discovery and access (assuming that the library's info about access is up-to-date and accurate)
3. the poor soul can ask a librarian for help (maybe the library has online or print access or is willing to ILL it)

With the exception of the first option, it's generally not easy or likely that our hapless user is going to be able to move from the Google search result to the item needed. For a window into the frustration this creates, check out Tom Matrullo's post that details his frustration with not being able to access articles in JSTOR that he found while searching Google. Matrullo reports that JSTOR has been exploring models for individual access (useful for those whose local library does not subscribe to JSTOR) but has not made much progress so far.

FYI: I found Matrullo's post via David Weinberger's site, Joho the Blog. I'm eagerly awaiting for my ILLed copy of Everything Is Miscellaneous to arrive any day now.

Tune in to Steven Bell live tomorrow

I'll be at the LACUNY Institute tomorrow, which is about the easiest conference in the world for me to attend, as it is held every May four floors above me in the library building here at Baruch College. For those of you like me who find it hard to get to conferences out of town, you might be interested to know that Baruch is trying an experiment of livestreaming the keynote speaker, Steven Bell, whose talk is titled “Reversing the Technology Ratchet: Using Design Thinking to Align Hi-Tech and Hi-Touch” (description here). Tune in by 9:15 am EST.

On his post today on Designing Better Libraries, Bell reminded me of the plan to stream his presentation. If the camera happens to pan the room, look for me (I'll try to wave).

Library Camp NYC

Just a quick note to "save the date" for Tuesday, August 14, 2007, which will be when the William and Anita Newman Library at Baruch College is hosting Library Camp NYC. There will be no charge for attendees. Details can be found on the Library Camp NYC wiki.

Reference services and Twitter

A few weeks ago, a friend put the idea into my head about whether there might be a use for Twitter for reference. If you're not familiar with Twitter, here's the basics:

• sign up for a free account
• send mini blog posts (140 characters max) to your account via a web form, your IM client (AIM, Gtalk, Jabber) , or your cell phone (as a text message)
• receive mini blog posts sent by those who you've selected from the Twitter network as friends; read the posts on your Twitter page or as text messages on your cell phone

As a way of keeping in touch with friends, especially when you are out and about (such as at a conference, barhopping, clubgoing, etc.), the Twitter service is pretty nifty. But is there a way libraries might want to use this service to connect to users? I've seen a couple of institutions that are having a go at it:

Casa Grande Public Library (AZ)

As Jeff Scott noted on his blog on the Library 2.0 network, took the feeds of library events, new books, etc. and fed them into rss2twitter so that they would automatically get fed into his library's Twitter account. This seems like an easy way to get greater mileage out of the RSS feeds that your library is already generating. In messages I exchanged with Jeff, he said the thought he might scale back the feed to just the day's events so users aren't overwhelmed with Twitter messages from just his library or maybe create two Twitter accounts: one for just the daily events only and another that is a mega-feed combining the various feeds the library has.

Nebraska Library Commission

Michael Sauers describes on the NLC blog how the commission has started twittering (sorry, I can't bring myself to use the more au courant term "tweeting") the latest reference questions received by the reference department. Although Sauers' blog post, which is dated March 23, says that the answers will be made available, I don't see any there yet.

Before discussing how Twitter might be used for reference services, I'd like to first note that our users might hesitate before adding the library as a Twitter friend if they intend to receive most of their Twitter messages via text messaging. As noted on the Twitter help pages, the Twitter service itself is free, but receiving the messages on your phone may incur charges depending on the plan you have with your carrier.

If you're cheap, like me, you pay for each text message received, often in the range of ten or fifteen cents per message (my monthly texting charges come out a very manageable $0, as I don't really bother with texting myself). Some folks have plans that allow them to buy a monthly bucket of messages (say, one hundred per month). Others may be so into texting that they've paid a little extra for a plan that allows an unlimited number of messages.

While our users might be interested in receiving an updated stream of library content (news, events, question/answer pairs from our reference service, new books, etc.), I'm not convinced
many users would be willing to pay for it (which they in fact would be doing if they (a) elected to receive Twitter updates on their cell phones and (b) have a phone plan where you pay a flat fee per text message or have a limited monthly supply of messages). If a library patron is also a Twitter user but elects to receive messages on IM and their personalized Twitter page, that's OK; its the folks who get Twitter on the cell phones that we might annoy. As Twitter notes to its customers, "Twitter can be addicting, so check your plan to make sure you don't get a huge bill."

Let's leave the issue behind of whether or not users would really want to add their local library as a Twitter friend; assume for the moment that they do. Is there a way that we could use Twitter to provide "reference" in some way? Perhaps. Here's an idea that builds on the way that the Case Grande Library users Twitter (use a pre-existing RSS feed to populate your Twitter account with content) and is inspired by the way that the Nebraska Library Commission promises to provide question and answer pairs:

1. User submits question to library (via Twitter direct message option or via chat, IM, email, reference desk, SMS reference, etc.)
2. Library answers the question and asks permission to add it (stripped of all personally identifiable information) to a publicly searchable knowledgebase available from the library's web site. That knowledgebase spits out a RSS feed of all newly entered question/answer pairs.
3. With permission from the user, the question and answer are added to the knowledgebase, which in turn sends out its RSS feed, which itself is sent to rss2twitter to be passed along to the library's Twitter account.

The Twitter account for the library would then be advertised on the library's home page. Library users who also happen to be on Twitter could add the library as a friend in Twitter so they can receive the stream of question/answer pairs. You could streamline this model by making it just a Twitter service. There would be no knowledgebase with an RSS feed that gets fed back into Twitter. Instead, the model would look like this:

1. Library sets up a Twitter account for reference and advertises it on library web site (among other places, obviously)
2. Users add the library as a friend in Twitter so they can send reference questions to Twitter, having been forewarned that there is no privacy in submitting their questions this way (the library could tell users that it's like putting a question on an online bulletin board or forum). Users might also use the direct message option in Twitter to submit their questions.
3. The library answers the question in Twitter using the direct message option.

There are more privacy issues in this second model that make me uncomfortable with it. Both models seem a bit awkward, too. My intent in publishing this post is toss an idea out there and see what kind of reaction it gets. Comments (please)?