I’m surprised to see the number of reference questions that you get as low as 10%. In my experience providing VR, I do see a lot of real reference questions, both ready reference and also questions that demand more time and research than can typically be given in a chat session. Still, I wouldn’t dismiss all those circ questions. If a patron uses VR to get help with a circ question and gets a good answer, won’t that patron be more likely to come back with other, maybe reference-type, questions? And won’t giving that patron help lead us closer to our goal of getting people to love libraries?

As far as using the phone to ask a question, you’re right, it’s not that hard to use the phone. But patrons shy away from using the phone for any number of reasons. Rather than telling patrons how they should communicate with the library, can we trust them to choose the method that suits them best?

When you say that “no one is training us to do this well”, rather than dismissing VR, how about demanding better training? To show a librarian how VR software works and then stick her behind a computer and say “ok, go!” is unfair to the librarian and to the patron. Librarians need training in how to communicate online, the value of a reference interview, and how to build up our VR competencies.

Do I give good VR service? Nope. It’s difficult when you look at the majority of questions asked. They are not ready-reference things that can be answered just by using the internet or databases.

90% of the time, they are users who want to know if they can renew their book. Or can I put XX on hold for them. Or why did they get this fine? Or what is the best way to get to XX branch from 55th Ave? They do not understand that when they click on this service, they are NOT necessarily talking to someone at their home libary.

The next 5% of questions are not able to be answered with a quick online search. Like Jessamyn’s question. A perfectly valid question, just not for a VR librarian session. Being in Illinois, I wouldn’t have had any idea how to get her that info besides Google.

The problem with the last 5%, real questions that can be answered online, is that NO ONE IS TRAINING US TO DO THIS WELL. I have 4 librarians on my staff who are supposed to do the service, and one of them can hardly use the internet for patrons here in the building, don’t make me laugh about trying to get her used to the chat windows and all.

I would like to state that none of us on staff see this as a good use of our time, we feel as though we are forced to do it because our director is gung-ho about it. I wish the director would wake up and see that when 1% of our population is using this, it’s not worth the expense. You can push it and push it to people as much as you want, but the public doesn’t care. It’s not like it’s difficult to get on the phone and ask a reference question.

I think that libraries are so afraid of being seen as behind the times, we then get ourselves into trouble trying to do things that people aren’t really asking for. And not even doing those things very well. Doesn’t really help us much, does it?

It is entirely possible to be in a library and be doing chat w/o access to the physical collection. For example I work from my office PC far from the reference collection and stacks. I can’t leave this to go to our very large 4-storey, 2-wing stacks to look for a book, as I am monitoring IM and consortial chat queues as well.

With a tablet or laptop I could use the print collections but am unlikely to if I am juggling 2 or more patrons as it’s hard enough to work with them in a stationary position. I don’t think this is a particularly unusual setup. Not an excuse but a reality check.

Jessamyn West has an interesting post about MassAnswers, the statewide virtual reference service for Massachussetts. It says a lot of the things that have occurred to me during the last three months, but I’d like to see more discussion about…

Having spent time trying to locate cemetery information for genealogical purposes, I wanted to mention that when I read your question, I immediately thought, “Woooo. Good luck with that.” Generally there is no complete listing of cemeteries out there, especially not with founding dates. There are simply too many obscure village cemeteries or tiny family cemeteries hiding out on old farms or in city personal gardens. While there are books that list cemeteries in states, I’ve never seen one that claimed to be complete. So while your experience was negative, I’m not sure that even a genealogy buff of a librarian who was in the library would have been able to help you.

For in depth research questions, VR systems have a lot of potential when it comes to teaching patrons how to use databases. However, the co-browsing feature is what makes this valuable and the instability of the new system makes that harder to do. This is really helpful for a lot of classroom assignments where students need x number of literary criticisms or journal articles, but isn’t so helpful for questions that require books. That said, I am glad the librarian refered you to a book. Again, the problems with co-browsing are technical problems, not problems of VR in general.

Anyway, I just wanted to pipe in a brief defense of VR in general. Personally, I prefer IM reference so I might not be the best one to make this argument.

Thanks for posting this, and the transcript. Very interesting indeed.

I sometimes wonder if the infrastructure required for 24/7 is worth the investment of staff time and resources? In one sense it seems like it is – having the library be available 24/7 can be a powerful marketing tool.

But… it seems to me like the services are being marketed in a way that suggests that they are “replacements” for live, face-to-face librarians in ones own library – in a sense, emulating the “classical” way of dealing with reference transactions and taking on any question from anyone. But if we are offering to take on “all comers” and their questions, I think we need to do a better job.

In reality these services seem to work far better as a “ready reference” resource. Which is a kind of reference that – for good or ill – is rapidly being replaced by people using the Internet themselves. In which case, I think there is a bit of a disconnect between what people are really coming to the service for and what the service provides.

[Though, to be fair, they may be a great resource for people who can't successfully search the web on their own, for whatever reasons.]