Expanding CUNY's Chat Reference Cooperative

For a number of years now, my library (Baruch College's Newman Library) and libraries from five other schools in the City University of New York system (Borough of Manhattan Community College, Brooklyn College, CUNY Graduate Center, Hunter College, and John Jay College) have been sharing a subscription to QuestionPoint and its academic reference cooperative service. Lately, a few other libraries in CUNY have expressed interest in joining our subscription group. For a number of reasons, I really hope at least one library does decide to participate.

First, any additional institutions in CUNY that join our subscription group will help lower prices for the currently subscribing CUNY schools. QuestionPoint's annual fees consist of three things: flat charges for a "service unit profile" and a "base management environment" and a charge for membership in the larger QuestionPoint cooperative reference service that is based on your subscription group's total FTE (for public libraries, I think it is based on the population numbers for your service area). With each additional college in CUNY joining our cooperative, the cost of the flat charge for the service unit profile and the base management environment is proportionally smaller for each already subscribing institution. The quote I just got from QuestionPoint also shows that the FTE costs would go down a bit if we added one or two more members to our subscription group. So while the overall cost to Baruch is still not trivial, it would go down if we can get some more members to share the subscription fees.

The second reason why I'm eager to have more CUNY schools join our cooperative is because having a 24/7 service is quite a major selling point to our students. CUNY students tend to work part or full-time jobs, juggle family responsibilities, and, in general, lead fairly complicated lives with hours that don't always mesh well with the hours of our physical libraries. (This report offers a nice profile CUNY's undergraduates, including the interesting data point that 41% of undergrads work for pay for 20 or more hours a week.)

I should also disclose here two things. First, I am on the QuestionPoint 24/7 Reference Advisory Board, a group that helps guide policy for how the academic and public cooperatives should work. Second, I should mention that although I really like the cooperative reference service itself that QuestionPoint offers, I am not blind to the price advantages offered by other chat/IM options and some of the features those tools offer that aren't in QuestionPoint (yet).

Moving Digital Reference to a New Domain

This spring, I hope to migrate this blog from my teachinglibrarian.org domain, where it has resided for the past six years to my stephenfrancoeur.com domain. I'm not sure what would be the best URL for my blog:

• http://stephenfrancoeur.com/blog
• http://stephenfrancoeur.com/digitalreference

With a URL ending in /blog, it will be easier for everyone to type the address in or for me to tell people where my blog is. Having it end in /blog will signal clearly to search engines that the site is a blog. I am kind of partial, though, to the URL ending in /digitalreference as it would neatly pair up my name and the blog title in the URL. Also, if I ever decide to start a second personal blog, it would be easier to add it to my stephenfrancoeur.com domain.

I'm torn about what to do. Any suggestions?

Ups and Downs of Video Reference

Earlier this January, Chad Boeninger wrote on his blog, Library Voice, about the lackluster use of the library's video reference service at Ohio University, which is advertised on the Skype portion of the library's Ask a Librarian pages. The library had also been using Skype to power a video reference kiosk located far from the reference desk (the service was ended last fall due to lack of use). Although Boeninger believes that his users may never get on board with the idea of requesting help via video chat, he does not have regrets about the project:

In many circles, our experiment with Skype video reference might be considered a failure.  At my library, we tend to try something while studying it, rather than study it for ages before attempting something new.  While we didn’t get the results we expected with our video kiosk experiment, setting up the service cost us almost nothing.  In the process, we learned about video calling software options, how to configure pages to close automatically with javascript,  discovered how flaky wireless connections and computer applications can be, and much more.  We also learned to be flexible, patient, and try different things to improve the service.

With his post in mind, I was intrigued to see that the Hennepin County Library is considering setting up its own video reference system. At the upcoming Library Technology Conference (March 17-18) at Macalester College, a pair of librarians from Hennepin County Library will give a talk titled, "Video Reference: A Pre-Test and Pilot Project." As noted in the description of the talk, the rationale for piloting such as a service is to address limited staffing options in two new libraries that the library system is opening and to see if the service might also help out in smaller libraries that also want to expand their reference options. Given Ohio University's experience with video reference, it will be very interesting to see if Hennepin County Library finds a way to make such a service work (my fingers are crossed for them!)

Text a Librarian and QuestionPoint to Partner Up

Hot off the presses comes the announcement this morning that Mosio and OCLC have agreed to work together to offer Mosio's Text a Librarian product to QuestionPoint subscribers. The announcement I've just received in my email didn't mention too many specifics about what this really means. I'm hopeful that for those of us who work at institutions subscribing to QuestionPoint already can now add on the Text a Librarian service and see the questions appear in the same web page as our email questions and chat transcript archives.

Helping the Unhelpful

The latest issue of RUSQ (volume 49, issue 2) features an article now sitting at the top of my "to-read" list:


Maness, Jack M., Sarah Naper, and Jayati Chaudhuri. "The Good, the Bad, but Mostly the Ugly: Adherence to RUSA Guidelines during Encounters with Inappropriate Behavior Online." RUSQ 49.2 (2009):  151-162. Web. 6 January 2009. (PDF of print version also available)


Here's the abstract:

Using a scoring rubric based on RUSA’s “Guidelines for Behavioral Performance of Reference and Information Service Providers” (RUSA Guidelines), librarians’ performance in 106 chat reference transcripts in which a patron was determined to be acting inappropriately were compared to 90 randomly chosen transcripts from the same time period in which no inappropriate behavior was identified. Librarians serving appropriately behaving patrons scored significantly better on two of five major dimensions of the RUSA Guidelines. Recommendations for librarians serving inappropriately behaving patrons and for improving the two affected dimensions are given.

Reference Services Symposium, March 12, 2010

For a number of years, Columbia University has been hosting an invitation-only reference symposium that has periodically attracted quite a bit of attention (the 2007 event featured a debate on the future of the reference desk that generated a lot of discussion beyond the day). This March, the symposium is open to all. Registration is $45. Also noteworthy this year: there is an open call for presentations at the event.
--via ACRL/NY Events and Jobs