Digital Reference

Reference desk scratchpad

Stephen Francoeur — Tue, 06 May 2008 15:25:00 +0000

I thought I'd share a handout I created for the reference desk at my library. For many years, when we were helping someone at the desk and wanted to write down some suggested search words or databases or web sites to try, we reached for a stack of scratch paper. Now, we've got a handy little form created in Microsoft Word that presents our notes to the patrons in a more structured manner. Librarians can fill this out as they see fit.

The form is divided into four sections:

Authors/Producers of Information. Here the librarian can write in a schematic way any specific people, organizations, or scholarly disciplines likely to be producing information relevant to the patron.
Databases. There is space for the librarian to write the name of databases and some notes about what specifically each one can be used for (for PsycINFO, I might write "articles by psychologists").
Keywords. There is a grid of boxes where librarians can cluster like related terms in a cells. This then makes it easy to write below some recommended search statements that include nested searches, as the boxes are meant to convey the idea of parentheses or the multiple boxes offered on advanced search screens.
Other Resources. This is a free area where we find ourselves writing down specific books and call numbers, web site URLs, etc.

The copies we use at our desk are two-sided. To help the handouts stand out from the mass of paper that students collect as they print out articles and web sites, we printed them on colored paper. If you find this handout useful, feel free to use it and adapt it as you see fit (no attribution or thanks is required).

How Wikipedia stacked up against subscription databases

Stephen Francoeur — Mon, 05 May 2008 20:25:00 +0000

I finished up my quick comparison of Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britannica, Gale Virtual Reference Library, and Oxford Reference that I blogged about earlier today.

My Plan
Do quick look ups of nineteen terms and concepts discussed in Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody to see what reference sources would be more helpful to the students I work with.

Methodology
Using quotation marks around search terms to force phrase searches, I looked in the following resources:

Wikipedia
Encyclopedia Britannica
Gale Virtual Reference Library
Oxford Reference

In any given set of search results, I would look first for main entries that mirrored my search terms exactly and record any such precise hits in a table. If there were no exact hits, then I looked for any entries in which most of my search terms were in the main entry (such as an entry on "social network services" when I searched for "social networks"). If none of my search words were in the main entry, then I looked for entries in which the search words appeared in the body of the entry and were adequately defined and explained (as opposed to simply cited or referenced in an offhand way).

If a particular resource had multiple main entries on the topic (as was the case in Gale Virtual Reference Library and Oxford Reference), then I made a note in my table that there other entries as well.

Caveats

Shirky's book is all about the ways that the latest technologies (especially on the web and on cell phones) have allowed people to organize in new ways that threaten the centrality of long-standing institutions and organizations. Wikipedia's entries can be created at any time by anyone, making it far more likely that this source will have entries on the latest tech developments. The other three sources all are reproducing content that was first published in book form, which means that there is a long lag time between the writing of the content and its appearance online, thus making it less likely that the technology topics will be as up to date as Wikipedia's.
The subscription from Baruch College to Gale Virtual Reference Library includes nearly 1100 reference sources originally published as printed editions. Each library's subscription to this database is likely to have a different set of sources in it.
The subscription to Oxford Reference I used has close to 270 sources in it. Most of the sources are subject dictionaries whose entries tend to be much briefer than the entries I was finding in Wikipedia and the other two databases
Although I refrained from doing any fancy searching (no fielded searches or adjacency operators), I did use quotation marks around my terms, something that many students are unlikely to bother doing. Students who don't do phrase searching are more likely to see that mishmash of results returned as more off-putting and believe they're "not finding anything good."
I didn't analyze the quality of results in any deep way. I just wanted to see if there was at least an adequate overview or definition of the topic in each source.
There's no presentation of what the actual search results looked up. Some sources gave many false hits that would have frustrated most searchers (e.g., "long tail" turned up pages of entries in the Encyclopedia Britannica that were on individual animals that happened to have long tails, which is not quite the same concept that Shirky was referring to).

Results
As you can see from the updated table of results, Wikipedia and Gale Virtual Reference Library both do pretty well and Encyclopedia Britannica fared the worst. With the Wikipedia entries, you have the added bonus of extensive linking to related Wikipedia entries, a reference list, and a set of links to external web sites. Gale Virtual Reference Library entries featured reference lists most of the time and some linking to other entries in the database.

While most of the topics were covered in all four sources, I found it interesting which sources had a main entry on the topic vs. which ones covered the topic in some other entry. For all but two topics, Wikipedia had a separate entry on each topic. This is not surprising, given that in Wikipedia, which is born digital, there is all the space in the world for yet another page, while the other three sources are all born in print, where each additional page added means greater printing costs.

For Further Research
My colleague Jerry Bornstein reminded me today that we once had discussed doing an analysis of the content of entries in Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica. Some day, I hope do that but also include the other two databases I looked in this project.

Wikipedia vs. Subscription Reference Sources

Stephen Francoeur — Mon, 05 May 2008 18:52:00 +0000

Last week, I mentioned that a group of students on a panel discussing how they do research all spoke of using Wikipedia to do background research on topics, ideas, concepts, etc., before diving in to find books and articles in our subscription databases. I've decided to undertake a little (unscientific) experiment to see how wise a course that may actually be. I've been reading Clay Shirky's great new book, Here Comes Everybody, for the past week and find it's chockablock with ideas from different disciplines. In the next week or so, I'll take a handful of concepts in the Shirky book and look them up in:

Wikipedia
Encyclopedia Britannica
Gale Virtual Reference Library
Oxford Reference Online

I want to see how many of the concepts I look up are main entries in these different resources (the latter three are ones that my library subscribes to). I realize that this experiment has a few flaws:

Shirky's book focuses on technology topics, a subject that Wikipedia is highly regarded for in its coverage
Gale Virtual Reference Library is not really a database per se but more of a platform allowing a library to subscribe to a customized collection of reference books in electronic form; no two libraries are likely to have the same collection of books
Oxford Reference Online subscriptions allow you to subscribe to different packages of reference sources; like Gale Virtual Reference Library, libraries do not all have the same collection

I've created a table in Google Docs that I'll update as I work on it. Feel free to check in on the document from time to time, but also be aware that I'll post a new blog entry to let everyone know I've finished the project.

Why don't our students ask for help?

Stephen Francoeur — Fri, 02 May 2008 18:44:00 +0000

Today, at the college where I work, we held a conference on general education programs that featured a panel discussion at which four students (two first-year students and two sophomores) discussed how they do research. Prodded by questions by the moderator (my colleague, Jerry Bornstein), the students spoke about how they often use Wikipedia for background research; how they all rely on databases (Academic Search Premier, LexisNexis, ebrary, the library catalog, and our federated search tool were all named by them); and how often they get research paper assignments (in the first few years, they typically only had one or two).

What really caught the attention of every librarian in the room was the agreement among all four students they had never asked a question at our reference desk or via our email and chat services. The most explanation they were able to offer as to why they had not asked for help was that they felt they did not need to. It's possible that since the students have only had few research assignments, they haven't really been pushed yet to research difficult topics or tackle large projects that require the use of many different kinds of resources.

Last fall, we had a similar panel discussion with students held just for the benefit of library staff. That panel also consisted of four students, all of whom were juniors and seniors. They all reported regular use of our reference services in all its incarnations. So it may be that the first-year students and sophomores in today's panel may find that by their junior and senior years they are asking reference questions. Clearly, a rigorous survey of all students would be an interesting project to purse. As far I know, there has not been a whole lot of research into how often college students ask reference questions at a college library, but I suspect it would yield a power law distribution (FYI: Clay Shirky has nice section on power law distributions and social systems in chapter five of Here Comes Everybody, which I'm reading now).

I wonder which combination of these reasons might be behind the reluctance of student to ask for help:

They don't want to ask a "dumb question" or appear incapable of doing the research themselves.
Libraries and research make them anxious.
They don't know they need help.
They're overconfident.
They really don't need our help.
They forget that reference services exist.
They don't know that reference services exist.
They had a bad reference experience elsewhere that turned them off the service.

Will an increase in marketing our reference services dramatically improve the number of questions we get asked? Of course any promotion is going to help boost the count of questions we get in reference, but will it ever make a dramatic effect or is there something more fundamental going on inhibiting our students from asking for help. (I should note that our library's reference statistics have been pretty stable over the past ten years and have not shown the declines seen at many other academic libraries.)

I guess a good place for me to get started understanding this problem is by reading a 1972 article by Swope and Katzer, "Why Don't They Ask Questions?" (and, of course, reading more from the Seeking Synchronicity project).

Baruch's reference blog

Stephen Francoeur — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 15:53:00 +0000

I am really pleased with the way that our library's reference blog, Reference at Newman Library, has continued to thrive after being launched four years ago. We've now posted over 1300 messages (and hundreds of comments, too); our weekly average is about a dozen posts.

When we started the blog, it was intended to do away with the informal and haphazard systems we had to notify each other at the desk of technical problems and to alert each other to new resources and tools. We had been using:

notes taped to the desk
a printed reference manual in a 3-ring binder, which is now replaced by our password-protected reference wiki (screenshots)
emails on internal listservs
word-of-mouth (i.e., tell the person coming on after you at the desk what to watch out for)

With the blog, we made all that great content easy to publish, easy to share, and easy to find again later. Since most of my colleagues don't like using feed readers to keep up with RSS feeds, I set up a system to forward every post to them via email as soon as the posts are published.

Since we started our blog in Blogger in the days long ago when the service did not offer categories or tags, I've been relying on a del.icio.us account I created to tag all the posts and give multiple entry points back to the content. Every time there's a new post, I tag it in del.icio.us. A link to the del.icio.us index can be found on right column of the blog, allowing my colleagues to scan the subjects covered already on blog posts. There's also a search box, which I hear gets pounded a lot by the staff trying to track down content they recall having seen.

Over time, the blog has turned into a repository of reference question and answer pairs. We often post stumpers to the blog or notable reference questions tied to assignments, which lately have been leading to more and more comments and suggestions from librarians. It's kinda interesting that if you Google Apple audited financial data the first hit is a post from our blog about what database to use to find this information.

As someone who started working at Baruch's library as an adjunct, I know how out of the loop you can feel when you miss out on staff meetings and informal conversations during the workday. A number of the adjuncts have mentioned to me that the blog (and the wiki) are invaluable to them for finding out about things that they might not have otherwise heard of.

Now if only I could convince my colleagues to use Bloglines or Google Reader to keep up with posts from the reference blog (as well as others they might enjoy)...

Did you know you can...

Stephen Francoeur — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 15:33:00 +0000

Did you know you can send blog posts to Blogger by using Jott? listen

Powered by Jott

What I write on Twitter

Stephen Francoeur — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 21:12:00 +0000

In case you were curious, here is what I use my Twitter account to talk about.

Podcasts I like

Stephen Francoeur — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 15:17:00 +0000

I recently added to the LIS Wiki a page with a list of podcasts that I listen to on my commute (a system that is for me a great way to learn when I am physically prevented from reading). Not all the podcasts are strictly by or for library staff (especially Jon Udell's) but all are highly recommended. My hats are off to the folks who make these podcasts for helping me to keep current.

Photo: " Radio station manager. [[African American Sargeant Julius C. McKenzie, Station Manag...] (December 1947)." New York Public Library. http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/id?1260303

Adding semantic web metadata to your blog posts

Stephen Francoeur — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 13:06:00 +0000

Lately, I've been interested in fooling around with semantic web technology and am intrigued by the Calais service that Reuters recently made available. As far as I can tell, one of the services that Calais will be able to provide is to automatically encode RDF metadata into your content. I was hoping to RDFify my blog posts, but upon getting started with setting up the Calais service I quickly realized that I was in over my head. The sign-up form for the API asks me "What is your prefered protocol? REST? SOAP? XML-RPC? JSON-RPC?" I'll be durned if I know.

For the fun of it, I did paste the text of a blog post into the Calais Viewer, which will then attach RDF metadata to your content (but it doesn't publish it for you, it just shows it to you as an example of what Calais can do). Here's a screenshot of what it did. Note the columns of automatically generated metadata on the side of the page: Facility, Industry Term, Person, URL.

Is there anyone reading my blog who can offer some advice about whether I can set things up with my blog so that the Calais enriched posts are available?

FYI: I first heard about Calais on this Talking with Talis podcast from March 11, 2008.

Open source subject guides

Stephen Francoeur — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 13:35:00 +0000

As a reference librarian, I must contend with all manner of subject areas that patrons want to ask me about when I'm doing reference. When I am doing cooperative chat reference and am helping a patron from another college, I am grateful for any subject guides that the patron's home library (i.e., the library at the college where the patron is a student or faculty) has created.

Making these subject guides is labor intensive (striking the right balance between too many and too few of the key resources; maintaining links; adding new sources and deleting defunct or outmoded ones; thinking about usability; etc.) The technology that the library goes with in setting up subject guides can really make a big difference in the quality of the guides; if a librarian has a hard time figuring out how to create or update his/her page, the page is likely to be orphaned by its creator. I was pleased to see that in the second issue of the Code4Lib Journal there is a nice survey of open source technology options for creating subject guides:

Corrado, Edward M. and Kathryn A. Frederick. "Free and Open Source Options for Creating Database-Driven Subject Guides." Code4Lib Journal No. 2 (2008).

Photo: "Seward Park: Interior views: Young people at Reference desk." NewYork Public Library. http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/id?100921

Virtual Reference Desk conference makes a comeback as "Reference Renaissance"

Stephen Francoeur — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 14:28:00 +0000

The Virtual Reference Desk conference, which last took place in 2005, will take place again this year in August under the new name, Reference Renaissance. I wish could go, but it is at the same time as when I'm going on vacation in Maine. I last attended the conference in 2001 in Orlando and was greatly energized by the focus on digital reference issues in all the presentations and poster sessions.

via Virtual Dave...Real Blog

Federated search bake-off

Stephen Francoeur — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 18:27:00 +0000

For anyone in the market for a federated search tool, it can be hard to compare products. As Sol Lederman at the Federated Search Blog notes, it's a challenge "because a number of vendors don’t have publicly available demo applications" or because, "where the demos do exist, it’s hard to compare them because they’re not searching the same sources."

Lederman is proposing to vendors that they allow him to set up demo site for their products on his blog in which each product is linked to the same set of publicly available databases (e.g., Medline, ERIC, etc.) He's asking his readers to submit a list of the databases that should be included in the standard set of ten that all products will work with. I think Lederman has got a great idea. Whether any of the vendors actually participate is an open question. Regardless, it's worth submitting your list of databases as comments on Lederman's original post.

Our library at Baruch College is about to launch a federated search tool using Serial Solutions' 360 Search. I am on the committee that was charged with figuring out how to set up the product; I've learned a lot of ugly truths about how search results are retrieved via federated search and how they are aggregated. Much of the literature in the library field that that I've read talks about the relationship between federated search and usability or federated search and information literacy; I'd like to see more that gets into the nuts and bolts of how well these tools actually work and where they are typically hamstrung by the database vendors, who often give the federated search vendors less than optimal gateways into their data. Having a central place where you could test drive different federated search tools would not only reveal how different interfaces work, it might also show how the connectors that federated search companies build for you are not all created equal.

David Lankes' presentation on the future of reference

Stephen Francoeur — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 15:49:00 +0000

Over the weekend, I was thrilled to be on a panel with David Lankes and Beth Evans at ALA Midwinter on reference services and social networking sites. I spoke about how libraries are currently using social networking sites now for reference services, Beth Evans from Brooklyn College spoke about her library has been using MySpace for reference, and David Lankes spoke about participatory reference.

If you've been following Lankes' blog postings over the past year or so, you know that he's been talking about participatory librarianship a lot. As he has been considering how libraries should be embracing the read/write web (web 2.0, etc.), Lankes has been trying to encourage librarians to figure out ways that they can focus on promoting, capturing, and making discoverable the conversations that take place in our lives. A conversation might simply be a librarian and patron in a reference interaction, it might be patrons speaking to each other or communicating online with each other, it might be a patron thinking aloud. His ideas about conversation are grounded in the theories of Gordon Pask expressed in Conversation Theory: Applications in Education and Epistemology.

At the ALA Midwinter panel last Saturday, Lankes sketched out "Scapes," his vision of how reference conversations could be made participatory. It was a compelling presentation that to my mind seemed to link together idealized tools for personal information management and knowledge management with web 2.0 technology. The visuals he offered really tell the story much better than I can here; luckily, Lankes is great about posting links on his blog to his slides, audio, and video, as is the case with this presentation:

The QuestionPoint folks who sponsored this panel videotaped the whole event. As soon as that video is online, I'll post a link.

Reference service on social networking sites

Stephen Francoeur — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 21:49:00 +0000

I'll be on a panel tomorrow at ALA Midwinter making a presentation about how libraries are using social networking sites for reference services. I've uploaded my slides to my Slideshare page, which you can also view right here.

| View | Upload your own

CNY Library Camp, March 4-5, 2008, Syracuse, NY

Stephen Francoeur — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 16:33:00 +0000

The wiki for the CNY Library Camp event that will be held on March 4-5, 2008, in Syracuse, NY just went live. If you've never been to a library camp before, which are run as unconferences, you really should, as it is a great way to collaborate with others.

QuestionPoint's widget

Stephen Francoeur — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 17:06:00 +0000

In a message on the main listserv for QuestionPoint subscribers, Susan McGlamery announced today that QuestionPoint will release in March 2008 a embedded chat box widget called Qwidget:

When you deploy Qwidget on your library web site, your users will enter your service through the widget interface. On the librarian side, they will appear in the chat monitor inside QuestionPoint. This allows multiple librarians to use your existing QuestionPoint account to handle users that come in via the widget, along with all other patrons arriving via the web-based chat and email forms in use today. The same collaborative and administrative tools would be available as well.

What QuestionPoint had in mind when designing this was the MeeboMe widget, which has been proved to be an easy way for libraries to set up an IM reference service with a minimum of fuss.

Online course in virtual reference skills

Stephen Francoeur — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 16:07:00 +0000

ACRL is offering an interesting online course, Virtual Reference Competencies II: Practice and Expand Communications Skills and Knowledge. The course is led by Diane Kovacs, who recently published a book on the same subject that I think I better get my hands on (I've added it to my list of books on digital reference services that I've been building in WorldCat).

Ask a librarian links in the catalog

Stephen Francoeur — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 20:37:00 +0000

Upon reading David Lee King's recent post about how his library (the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library) now has a MeeboMe widget appear after a null search in the catalog, I thought how unusual. But then reading the comments to his post, I learned that at least one other library has already implemented this.

I'm going to see if such wizardry is possible with our catalog (Ex Libris Aleph).

Marketing digital reference to computer lab users

Stephen Francoeur — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 14:06:00 +0000

Yay! I'm thrilled that the folks running the main, 320-seat computer lab here at Baruch College have agreed to put a desktop shortcut to our Ask a Librarian service on every workstation and to put a browser toolbar button as well (IE and Firefox).

Note to self: check to see that there's still an ask-a-librarian link on the opening page in Blackboard that every student sees.

My Slideshare page

Stephen Francoeur — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 20:52:00 +0000

I finally took the time (all of 5 seconds) to set up an account on Slidshare.net so I could upload a slide presentation that I'll be giving tomorrow at Columbia University Libraries, which you can see here as well.

| View | Upload your own

Free webinar on QuestionPoint's lightweight chat tool

Stephen Francoeur — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 14:18:00 +0000

I haven't had a chance to check this out yet myself, but there's a webinar now available from QuestionPoint that features their Chat 2 patron interface, which is designed to be more accessible to users who use screen reading software on their machines.

via QuestionPoint: 24/7 reference services

Firefox extensions I can't live without

Stephen Francoeur — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 19:04:00 +0000

Using the Extension List Dumper addon, I just created this list of all the things I've installed in my Firefox browser at work:

Book Burro - Remixing the bookstore 0.36

http://www.bookburro.org

Find the cheapest books

CustomizeGoogle 0.63

http://www.customizegoogle.com/

Enhance Google search results and remove ads and spam.

CuteMenus - Crystal SVG 1.9.1

http://www.cutemenuproject.com/

Adds icons to all menus.

del.icio.us 1.2.1

http://del.icio.us/

Keep, share and discover all your favorite things.

del.icio.us Complete 1.3

http://delicious.mozdev.org/

del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others.

EverNote Web Clipper 1.0.0.88

(Disabled)

http://www.evernote.com/

Provides a button and context menus to easily add a selection or an entire page to EverNote as a saved note

Extension List Dumper 1.8.0

http://sogame.awardspace.com/

Dumps a list of the installed extensions.

Firefox Showcase 0.9.3.3

http://showcase.uworks.net/

Easily locate any tab you've opened in Firefox.

Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer 1.0.1

http://www.foxmarks.com/

Synchronizes your bookmarks across machines.

FoxyTunes 2.9.5.31

http://www.foxytunes.com/

Control any media player from Firefox and more...

Gmail Space 0.5.6

http://www.getgspace.com/

Use your Gmail account space for file storage. Enables uploading/downloading of folders.

Greasemonkey 0.7.20070607.0

http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/

A User Script Manager for Firefox

Java Console 6.0.02

Java Console 6.0.01

Link Evaluator 0.9.9.5

http://evaluator.oclc.org

Customizable pre-evaluation of web links and linked content

LinkChecker 0.6.1

http://www.kevinfreitas.net/extensions/linkchecker/

Check the validity of links on any webpage.

MeasureIt 0.3.6

http://www.kevinfreitas.net/pro/extensions/

Draw out a ruler to get the pixel width and height of any elements on a webpage.

Menu Editor 1.2.3.3

http://menueditor.mozdev.org/

Customize application menus

Mina Rees Library CUNY Graduate Center 1.2.9

http://www.libx.org/editions/69/E0/69E01436/libx.html

Toolbar for CUNY Graduate Center Library Users

Morning Coffee 1.26

http://shaneliesegang.com/projects/coffee.php

Keeps track of daily routine websites and opens them in tabs.

newmanlibrary Toolbar 1.5.18.0

http://www.conduit.com

More than just a toolbar.

OpenURL Referrer 2.3.6

http://openly.oclc.org/openurlref

Converts bibliographic citations to URLs.

Operator 0.8

http://www.kaply.com/weblog/

The Semantic Web in Action

Pearl Crescent Page Saver Basic 1.5

http://pearlcrescent.com/products/pagesaver/

Save an image of a web page to a file.

Searchbar Autosizer 1.3.7

http://searchbarautosizer.mozdev.org

Expand the searchbox as you type

Snapper 1.3

Allows you to create a snapshot of a designated area in a web page.

Sxipper 0.9.30.20660

http://www.sxipper.com

Pre-fills web forms, manages passwords, and supports OpenID logins.

Tab Mix Plus 0.3.6

http://tmp.garyr.net

Tab browsing with an added boost.

Tab Preview 0.3

http://ted.mielczarek.org/code/mozilla/tabpreview/

Preview tab contents on mouseover

Talkback 2.0.0.6

http://talkback.mozilla.org/

Sends information about program crashes to Mozilla.

TwittyTunes 0.5.3.1

http://www.foxytunes.com/twittytunes/

Post your tunes to Twitter using FoxyTunes, and more...

Web Developer 1.1.4

http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/

Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.

Zotero 1.0.0rc3

http://www.zotero.org

The Next-Generation Research Tool

Taking it straight to the kids

Stephen Francoeur — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 14:25:00 +0000

This is so cool! QandANJ, the statewide virtual reference service, ran a commercial (locally, not nationally, I assume) during last night's Video Music Awards on MTV.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocLdyeAqUmg

Librarians as chat patrons

Stephen Francoeur — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 00:46:00 +0000

Rachel Singer Gordon over at the Liminal Librarian wrote up her experience asking a question from the Illinois statewide chat reference service. The post features a comment by Karen Schneider, who also expresses frustration she's had, too, when acting as user in chat reference services.

As someone who's managed a chat service at an academic library for six and a half years (three of which have been part of a cooperative service among college libraries nationwide) and read every single transcript that's come over our transom, I can say that the issue of quality is indeed an ongoing challenge for such service. I've seen great reference librarians who shine at the desk stumble in the online environment. Unless you do chat a lot, keeping your skills sharp is hard (and by skills, I don't just mean a facility with the software but also with how to communicate effectively online and do reference interviews in a cramped medium).

For what it's worth, QuestionPoint (to which our library has been a subscriber for over three years) has some good tips sheets on netiquette and effective online communication. I've linked to a number of these QuestionPoint documents on the QP at CUNY wiki I set up for the librarians here in CUNY that share a QuestionPoint subscription. (I should also mention here that I serve as a member of the QuestionPoint 24/7 Advisory Board.)

User write up of Library of Congress' Ask a Librarian service

Stephen Francoeur — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 15:26:00 +0000

On the AppScout blog, Alan Henry writes about his experience using the e-mail portion of the Ask a Librarian service at the Library of Congress.

via Library Stuff