Virtual Reference Service

Rutgers Professor Marie Radford has a YouTube post about virtual reference service .

I serve as a reference librarian equipped with chat technology such as described by Dr. Radford. However, with a student body of perhaps 10,000 students, most prefer to use email or the telephone to communicate, not a service where they must type in a chat box. After perhaps six months of using the chat service, we rarely get one chat request in a day. With such sporadic use it is hard to justify keeping someone at a desk where they would wait for a chat query.

Another problem with chat service is that the synchronous typing back and forth is very s-l-o-w. This limitation makes it suited for quick answers such as the library hours, but not for the type of interview a librarian wants to hold with a serious researcher.

An ethical issue with typed chat clients is that authentication is not required to promote ease-of-use. This means that the librarian really does not know who they are chatting with, and thus cannot ethically release information such as library account numbers, information about books on loan, etc., over the chat stream. So if any of these common requests appear, the chat has to be aborted and an email sent.

In summary, chat offers a mode of service that is appreciated, but in no way does it replace the phone, email, or personal visit to the library.

-DD