My Workshop on "Effective Chat Reference"

Today I led a workshop at the Metropolitan Library Council of New York titled, "Effective Chat Reference." I had nine attendees, who all asked great questions and kept me on my toes.

Although I've trained dozens of librarians over the years about how to do chat reference, it's always been in the context of the chat reference service offered by the library at my college (Baruch College). In those workshops, I was showing my colleagues how to use our software to help our students following our reference policy. Today's workshop was trickier because I had to teach chat reference that were transferrable to any chat or IM software environment.

As you can see from the handout below, I broke the training down into six sections: general principles of chat reference; how to greet patrons; how to clarify the question; how to connect patrons to sources; how to close a session; and how to deal with rude patrons.

To ensure that we could have some hands-on activities in a chat environment, I created five separate Meebo rooms in which attendees were paired up with each other and had a chance to play librarian and patron with each other. Despite Meebo's recent notoriety for being unstable, I had no problems with it and found it an easy way to set up chat space for the workshop participants.

I also tried another experiment that I had never done before using a different free web service, EtherPad, which lets a group of people simultaneously edit a shared document. Usually, at the start of workshops, I like to ask everyone in the room to introduce themselves (name and institutional affiliation) and tell me about what they hope to get out out of the instruction. Today, I set up an EtherPad, gave out the URL to everyone, and let them type up this information in the first few minutes of the class. We had a few problems getting everyone to the URL for the shared document, as EtherPad generates really odd-looking URLs for any new page you set up (it's a mix of numbers and lower- and upper-case letters). Once everyone was there and typed up their information, it was nice that we could all see it on the screen and get a sense of who was in the room. One of the attendees was tweeting the workshop, too!

One thing that I hadn't planned for was that a little more than half of the attendees did not actually do chat or IM reference themselves, nor did the libraries where they worked have such a service. I had not wanted to make this a workshop about how to set up a chat reference service; instead, I wanted to focus on how to make the most of the communication medium to have successful reference interactions. In the end, I answered quite a few questions about how the cooperative service at QuestionPoint works. I also put in a pitch for Library H3lp, Meebo, and Spark as IM/chat reference software solutions. Finally, I also encouraged all who attended to check out anything that Marie Radford has published or presented in the last few years, as her work with Lynn Silipigni Connaway on the Seeking Synchronicity project has yielded all sorts of fascinating insights into what users and librarians think of chat reference services.

Francoeur Effective Chat Reference METRO 28 April 2009

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