April 25, 2005

Campus-SpecificVitural Reference Service –Three UW libraries

Prepared by Cynthia Bryan

 

 

UW-Madison (using OnDemand from Convey Systems)—comments from Steven Frye

 

In bulleted form, here are some of the things that have helped to make our virtual reference (chat) service successful:

 *  It was reference librarians that initially wanted to create and staff this service (i.e.bottom up, not top down approach).

 *  'Reference Coordinator' committee comprised of reference librarians and heads of reference services from largest libraries and representatives from smaller libraries.  The committee represents the reference needs of all campus libraries (over 35 libraries on campus).  This committee took the ball and ran with it... through the evaluating, testing, and implementing period (which lasted 2 years).

*  We were patient in implementing this service.

*  We were flexible in how service is staffed: from the desk or offices, by librarians and SLIS students

*  Staffed by  +40 librarians and staff members (including SLIS students )... so we can offer quite a number of service hours... but most librarians only have to staff this service a few hours a week.

*  We provided in-house systematic training to all librarians and library staff involved with providing this service.  This consisted of a half-day part demonstration part hands-on training session.  We also created an in-house training manual... much shorter than Convey's training manual which focused on how the software would be used 'in-house' and focused only on features that would be used by most librarians and staff.

*  Marketed  service to 75% of all freshman and many other students through our

library instruction classes.  We either begin or end most library instruction classes by demonstration.

*  We heavily marketed this using posters, table tents, mass emails, etc.

*  We use a 'persistent button' that requires a download - but is already on all library and infolab pcs running IE.  This persistent button is found within the IE navbar and persistent throughout most library Web pages, many of our most used journal databases, and our catalog.

*  Our persistent button was professionally created - so it looks good.

*  Our software (convey's OnDemand) has very useful advanced features. In addition to chat, we can lead users around (URL share), see exactly what they see (Share/Browser Share), and share a picture of us (so they know they're talking to a human being and not just a computer).

 

Future Directions:

 *  We are beginning to see a decline in use (we average around 1000 calls per semester).  This is because our service only works with PCs running the IE browser. Therefore, we are in the midst of looking at a replacement application for our service that is browser and operating system independent.

 

Finally, here is a link to a presentation that Eunice Graupner and I coordinated and presented at ACRL Conference 03 http://www.library.wisc.edu/libraries/reference/acrl/

UW-Parkside (using HumanClick, then VRLplus from Docutek)—comments from Cynthia Bryan

The UW-Parkside Reference Team instituted chat reference at UW-Parkside in spring semester of 2001 with a free version of HumanClick.  Because we were not sure how well-received this would be among our patrons, we did not want to invest a lot of money and we wanted to keep the process itself very simple. It soon became apparent, however, that the “chat experiment” was going to be a positive experience. Here are the reasons:

• The chat was local only, primarily used to answer questions from UW-Parkside students, staff, and faculty about local issues and assignments. (We do get the occasional question from the community, but these are usually directional; such as “How late does the library stay open on Monday?”) This enabled our staff to appear knowledgeable to the patrons and helped us build confidence in the service. At first, most questions were more "information desk" types, and not really research oriented.  However, as time went on, we began getting more questions about the research process and about research resources. 
• We found a way to keep the chat active all day and most of the evening. We learned very early that the person working the Reference Desk could not handle all of the questions coming in by chat, because either the people on the telephone or at the desk would be upset by being interrupted, or the person "chatting" would "hang up" because no one answered right away.  As mentioned before, we were using the free version of HumanClick, which did not include canned answers. So we either answered or the patron thought we were not there.  When this became a real problem, we got permission to put HumanClick on all of the reference librarians' office computers.  Whoever was free when the "bell rang", answered. Sometimes more than one of us caught the chat -- but the program notified the last person to answer of that someone else was already on the line.   In the evening, when only one of us was on duty, covering the chat was a little harder -- but we are usually not as busy then as we are during the day and we learned to warn the patron right away if they had to wait while we looked for information.
• We have not promoted this service very actively-- just within the Information

Literacy class and our own class-specific instruction. We only have 6 full-time

reference librarians that keep the software open on their desktops, and we have been concerned with keeping up with the demand. During mid-semesters, it can be fairly busy; during the summer and breaks, it is very slow.

• We continued to upgrade the service as the chat became a more established method of reference. We have progressed from free HumanClick to paid HumanClick -- and have now installed Docutek's VRLplus.  The longer we offered this service, the more sophisticated the questions and answers became -- and we have been hard pressed to keep up!

 

We have been working on installing VRLplus for the past 6 months. (We have kept HumanClick going while we practiced and ironed out glitches.) Finally we felt we were ready to jump in -- So on December 15 we went live. Here is what we have added to the service:

• Canned responses -- which enables us to alert the patron to a wait when we are looking up lengthy answers
• Statistical reports -- up until now this was all done by hand, among the librarians. This program counts all sessions and questions answered.
• Ability to co-browse -- the librarian can co-browse websites with the patron and give instruction as they work together.
• Ability to push pages -- the librarian can send relevant materials to the patron.
• Ability to create an “expert answers” database.
• Ability to save session transcripts. (This one is not working correctly yet.)

 

We have continued our practice of keeping the program on all of the librarian’s computers -- and this has become even more necessary as the answers have required more time. 

 

One drawback! The patron must configure their computer (enable Java VM, etc) because of the co-browsing capability. Our usage statistics seems to have dropped off some since we have installed VRLplus, and we are wondering if this is the reason.  However, we’ve only had this up for a couple of months, so it is possible that the patrons are just not comfortable with the system yet.

 

 

 

UW-Stevens Point (using eLibrarian from Digi-Net Technologies)—comments from Patti Becker

We are just beginning our service and have not gone live yet.  Implementation is time consuming! We hope to come up March 7, 2005.

One positive aspect that I think will emerge is that patrons will get answers from librarians who are truly knowledgeable about our library resources (one of our objections to a consortium was based on an analysis of reference email questions that showed a high proportion of institution-specific questions). 

Because we want to try it solo, we also will experience some limitations, like having only a relatively small staff pool to draw on (11 librarians), which results in very limited hours.   Again based on our email analysis, we are only offering it 10-2 M-TH each week of the semester.  These are the times when we received the most reference email.