Facets of reference

Inspired by David Weinberger (author of Everything Is Miscellaneous, which should be required reading for all librarians today), who argues for the value of allowing for a variety of classification schemes to blossom, I was thinking about the ways that librarians typically talk about the dichotomy between "digital reference" (which includes chat reference, instant messaging reference, SMS reference, email reference) and traditional reference (which mostly means face-to-face reference at a reference desk). As a thought experiment (at 4 am, unfortunately), I began to think of different ways to slice and dice reference. My expectation is that by conceptualizing as many facets of reference as possible, I might shift my thinking about the future of reference service and also grapple with the question of what is and what isn't reference. For example, if I am in a professor's office in the philosophy department and he asks me for help tracking down an article, isn't that reference? Is a knowledgebase built from actual user inquiries and searchable by users from the library web site a reference service?

By Library Type

• academic library reference
• public library reference
• law library reference
• corporate library reference
• medical library reference
• museum library reference
• school library reference

Synchronous Reference

• reference desks
• reference consultations/reference appointments
• chat reference
• instant messaging reference
• video reference
• telephone reference (unless the user gets our voice mail!)
• VoIP reference

Asynchronous Reference

• email reference
• SMS reference
• fax reference (is there any library that gets questions this way?)
• mail reference
• reference bulletin board (users post questions and librarians reply)
• knowledgebases (is a knowledgebase really a reference "service" if there is no personalized assistance from a librarian at the time the user submits a question)

By the Number of Librarians Who Help Compared to Number of Users Helped
(Caleb Tucker-Raymond's post, "reference 2.0 vs library 2.o," on L-net got me thinking about this aspect)

• many librarians helping one user (e.g., referrals, two librarians a desk helping one patron)
• one librarian helping one user
• one librarian heling many users (e.g., group of students at the reference desk or in a reference chat room staffed by the library)
• many librarians helping many users (reference blog, reference bulletin board or Q&A service)

By Written Communication

• chat reference
• IM reference
• SMS reference
• bulletin board reference
• email reference
• fax reference
• mail reference

By Spoken Communication

• face-to-face reference (reference desk, reference appointments, etc.)
• telephone reference
• VoIP reference
• video reference

By Staffing Model

• librarians only
• tiered reference (paraprofessional referring to librarian as needed)
• outsourcing (e.g., a chat service that subscribes to a service that provides librarians to take calls during off hours)
• collaborative reference (network of libraries whose staff answers each others reference questions)
• a chatbot (such as Stella at the University of Hamburg Library, who provides an amusing interface as you submit natural language queries to a highly structured and well thought out knowledgebase...you didn't think you were really chatting with a bot, did you?)
  

By Level of Service Expected or Delivered to the User

• ready reference
• directional
• policy or procedural
• subject search
• research

What did I miss?

IM legal issues?

I'm writing a chapter on the future of chat reference for an edited book to be published by ACRL and busy trying to track down citations for various things I learned from other people. When I asked Caleb Tucker-Raymond if he could recall where I may have read his comment that library use of commercial IM products might actually violate their terms of service, he went and did the research all over again, e-mailed it to me, and then posted it on the L-net blog.

I'll put my comments about the content of his post on the L-net blog, but I will take a moment now to say that I think Caleb consistently proves himself to be one of the most innovative people writing about digital reference services. Check out all the great work of his on the L-net blog to see what I mean, then go search the archives of the Dig_Ref list for more proof.

Library Camp NYC news

I've been busy planning Library Camp NYC with my colleagues Steven Kaye and Rachel Watstein. Last month, we had to close registration after we maxed out the number of registrants (150); we're now in the process of confirming those registrations to get a more accurate head count.

There's been a lot of work on the event wiki lately, including:

• a News page (get the RSS feed here or sign up here for email delivery)
• a What To Expect page that will offer some details on how our unconference will actually run
  
• a History page that tries to capture the planning work that went into the conference (in case anyone else is planning a similar event and wants to see what we were thinking about)

Lately, we've been ironing out the details about how the final program will be developed during the first hour in the morning. Right now, what we'll probably do is ask attendees who would like to lead a discussion session to write on a sheet of paper what that session will be about. Then, the event facilitators will gather all these suggestions, merge or split session ideas as needed, and then show all the ideas on a projected screen. After getting some rough estimates from the attendees about the number of people likely to attend each session--attendees will give a show a hands for each session--the event facilitators will place the sessions in the schedule grid, thereby creating the final program.

As I've been preparing for Library Camp NYC, I've been scouring the web for resources on the subject of unconferences generally. I was pleasantly surprised recently to learn about a pair of library-themed unconferences in Australia:

• l2 conference Melbourne was held on March 2, 2007, at the Yarra Plenty Regional Library
• Library2.o on the Loose will be held on August 2, 2007, at the State Library of Western Australia

It was also interesting to hear people referring to the BIGWIG Social Software Showcase as a sort of unconference. I wish I had been at the ALA annual conference last month and able to attend, as it sounded like a great forum.

Increased transparency at QuestionPoint

QuestionPoint has made significant moves lately to make itself more transparent to subscribers. It wasn't that long ago that QuestionPoint's blog was password-protected and only available to libraries that were subscribers. Last year, the blog went public. But the greatest move toward opening up can be seen in these two recent posts on the blog:

Quality Top 10

As the adminstrator for Baruch College's chat reference service, I find myself using the feedback mechanism frequently. Every day, I read the chat sessions that other librarians from other colleges have had with Baruch patrons. If I see that exemplary or problematic service was offered, I have the option of sending a message (from within the QuestionPoint interface) to an ombudsperson at QuestionPoint, who will review my comments and then, if necessary, pass them along with her own commentary to the QuestionPoint administrator at the library whose staff's service caught me eye. This blog post is a distillation of the issues that come up most often in the QuestionPoint quality control feedback loop. If you're not a QuestionPoint subscriber, much of this post won't make sense. But I would like to give credit for QuestionPoint for being open about problems in the way service is sometimes offered in the chat reference cooperative.

QP user group meeting: June 25, 2007

This post captures some of what was said at the user group meeting held during the ALA annual meeting last month. Attendees were asked to submit lists of what they like and, more interestingly, didn't like about the software. I wish I had been able to attend, as I too would have been one of the voices pleading with QuestionPoint (and OCLC honchos) to hurry up and invest all the money and time needed to find a way to integrate IM with their flash chat client.

Personalized federated search tool?

Immersed as I am in the implementation of a federated search tool at my library, I had a random thought to throw out: are there any federated search tools that allow users to create and save their own unique clusters of databases (a custom search engine of favorite databases)? If so, it would be really cool if users could share their customized cluster with others. At my school, students are frequently working on group assignments, such as researching a company. It would be cool if one student could set up a cluster of databases to share with other members of the group.