3rd Annual Digital Reference Conference

Citation

Tunender, H. (2002), "3rd Annual Digital Reference Conference", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 19 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2002.23919bac.005

3rd Annual Digital Reference Conference

Heather Tunender

Approximately 450 people gathered in Orlando, Florida, November 12 and 13 to attend the 3rd Annual Digital Reference Conference entitled "The Virtual Reference Desk ­ Setting Standards and Making it Real". Attendees came from the USA, the UK, Canada, Japan and Singapore. They represented libraries currently offering digital reference (DR) or those looking to do so in the near future. For the first time, the VRD conference included an exhibit hall. A total of 13 booths offered DR software demos, library school representatives, library publishers and more.

Given the relative infancy of DR, the number of presenters was remarkable. DR is an indelible part of library service. This excellent two-day conference provided an opportunity for those of us involved in DR to share ideas, make connections and explore new solutions to our common problems.

Each day was designed around seven tracks, each with its own theme. There were three to four sessions within each track:

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  Research in Digital Reference.

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  Digital Reference Case Studies.

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  Digital Reference Standards.

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  Real-Time Reference.

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  Collaborative Reference Efforts.

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  Managing Digital Reference Services.

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  Training and Education for Digital Reference.

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  Evaluating Digital Reference.

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  Special Issues in Digital Reference.

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  Digital Reference Product Demonstrations.

Of the sessions I attended, topics included DR case studies, surveys of librarians participating in DR service, topics for future DR research, DR question analysis, and DR training, DR issues.

I spoke with several librarians about their real-time DR staffing models. Some libraries provide DR from a "call center", where their librarians answer e-mail and real-time reference questions as well as answer the reference desk phone (e.g. North Carolina State University). Others provide real-time reference from the physical reference desk (e.g. Austin Peay State University). DeAnne Luck, Electronic Resources Librarian at Austin Peay, stated that in the future they plan to provide real-time DR from librarians' offices during the day, the physical reference desk in the evening, and from home at weekends. She also noted that the NCSU "call center" model was ideal. The consensus at this point is that real-time DR can be offered at the physical reference desk, but if at all possible it should take place in a different location, preferably in the proximity of the physical reference desk. Proximity is important so that DR librarians have access to core print reference materials. There is general agreement that the attention required to complete a real-time reference transaction detracts from providing good reference service to in-person patrons.

The DR interview was a popular topic. I heard repeatedly, from presenters and conference attendees alike, that the reference interview changes in a DR encounter. DR librarians must define new rules and standards of quality for the DR interview in both real-time and e-mail reference. Jana Ronan and Mimi Pappas, from the University of Florida, presented a session entitled "Interviewing the Virtual User: Negotiating Reference Questions Online" that utilized RUSA's "Guidelines for Behavioral Performance of Reference and Information Services Professionals" (http://www.ala.org/rusa/stnd_behavior.html ). They explored how the Guidelines might apply to the real-time reference interview. Look for complete details in their upcoming article.

Their session on "Training Digital Librarians" (Pauline Lynch Shostack and Jennifer Barth from the ERIC Clearing-house on Information & Technology) emphasized the need to deal with certain policy issues before launching a DR service. Among those are defining how you will deal with multiple patrons in a real-time reference session, handling odd/disruptive patrons, and when to switch to another mode of communication (e-mail, phone, in-person).

It seems that libraries offering real-time DR use e-mail reference statistics to determine the best hours for their real-time reference. It will be interesting to check back and see if the selected hours prove to be the most effective. At this point, those of us involved in real-time DR service are taking cues where we can find them.

In a session entitled "Current Research on Digital Reference", Joseph Janes (Assistant Professor, The Information School of the University of Washington) summarized some of the research literature "from 2000 and 2001 plus two studies at UW." Included in that list was an article from Ross & Nilsen, "Has the Internet Changed Anything in Reference?" (RUSQ, Vol. 40 No. 2, Winter 2000, pp. 147-55). In it, the authors send library school students to public and academic libraries to observe librarians' reference service performance. They looked at three behaviors:

1. 1.

   the librarian bypasses the interview (48 per cent do);

2. 2.

   librarian gives an unmonitored referral (librarian does not check whether the patron is ultimately successful) (32 per cent do not check); and

3. 3.

   librarian fails to ask follow-up questions (35 per cent failed to follow up).

Regarding use of electronic resources in transaction (indexes, databases, search engines, Web pages, but not the OPAC) 14 per cent of public libraries and 42 per cent of academic libraries used electronic resources, but only 6 per cent of public libraries and 16 per cent of academic libraries used free Web.

Other research articles included were Kristine K. Stacy-Bates' "Ready-reference resources and e-mail reference on academic ARL Web sites", RUSQ, Vol. 40 No. 1, Fall 2000, pp. 61-73; Marilyn Domas Whites's "Diffusion of an innovation: digital reference services in Carnegie Foundation Master's (Comprehensive) Academic Institution Libraries," Journal of Academic Librarianship, Vol. 27 No. 3, 2001, pp. 173-87; Bernie Sloan's "Ready for reference" (URL); Joshua Boyer's "Virtual reference at North Carolina State: the first 100 days", Information Technology and Libraries, Vol. 20 No. 3, September 2001, pp. 122-8; and Janes' own, yet to be published, research. The first article, to be published in RUSQ, Janes and Hill conducted e-mail interviews with 18 Dig_Ref subscribers from academic, public and corporate libraries. A second survey of public and academic librarians' attitudes and experiences concerning DR is in press at JASIST.

Janes identified several areas where DR research should be done in the future: user studies (including needs assessment), DR evaluation, evolution/longitudinal studies.

Opening Session, Day 1

The opening session featured two prominent players in the library world: first, R. David Lankes, PhD, Information Institute of Syracuse (IIA). Lankes founded the Virtual Reference Desk project and was co-founder of the AskERIC e-mail reference service. Second, Clifford Lynch, Director of Coalition for Networked Information (CNI).

Introduction: Setting the Stage

R. David Lankes, Director, Information Institute of Syracuse and Assistant Professor, Syracuse University's School of Information Studies.

Lankes first identified several DR "movements" that are currently being addressed:

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  The need for good training. ACRL, RUSA and OCLC are working on workshops and courses for future library conferences.

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  The importance of DR to digital libraries.

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  The need for DR standards. The Information Institutes of Florida State University and Syracuse University are currently studying DR quality assessment methods and costs. They hope to develop effective DR assessment methods that will help libraries with DR quality control (http://quartz.syr.edu/quality/). Also, a NISO NetRef workshop took place April 25-26, 2001 (http://www.niso.org/news/events_workshops/netref.html) to discuss setting national DR standards.

His thoughts on the future of DR:

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  DR is emerging as more and more libraries begin to experiment with available software.

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  Many libraries will move from experimentation to offering a permanent service. They will also move from offering a local service to collaborating across cities and states.

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  There will be a push to standardize and improve operability of DR software.

Potential problems:

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  Missing users. We need to understand what brings patrons to us. (In both the traditional and the DR environment for that matter.)

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  Asynchronous (e-mail) and synchronous (real-time) DR software should be integrated. Currently no good software is available that fulfills both tasks.

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  There seems to be a "greedy librarian problem." Librarians do not necessarily trust that another person will be able to provide the best answer. We must be willing to trust other librarians to answer our questions when our patrons will be better served by specialists. We must be willing to refer for collaboration to succeed.

In closing, Lankes believes that DR is revolutionizing reference service. That it is part of a larger process to re-invent the library for the present and the future.

Keynote Address

Clifford Lynch, Director of Coalition for Networked Information (CNI).

Clifford Lynch echoed Lankes' sentiment that DR will bring institutional and social change to libraries. DR interweaves content, people, social systems and computer systems, thus forcing us to look at details that may have been overlooked previously. (For example, information dissemination practices/ referrals and public key infrastructure (computer systems that manage identity).) Defining DR will bring librarians from all areas of the library together.

As a member of the NISO Standards Development Committee ("responsible for identifying new topics for standardization, evaluating proposals for new Standards and Guidelines, and monitoring the need to revise NISO Standards and Guidelines", http://www.niso.org/committees/sdc.cfm), Lynch noted that the Committee sees the necessity of standards for DR. But, they feel that it is dangerous to define standards too early in the DR development stage. When DR practices are allowed to mature, and procedures have been developed, the Committee will know what standards are necessary and what those standards should accomplish.

Their focus at this point is the development of mechanistic rather than policy standards. Mechanistic standards enable policy, while policy standards define operations and require consensus on how those operations will proceed. Mechanistic standards simply define how information is transferred, as is done with ILL standards defining how institutions submit requests and the communication methods used to transfer those data. In a DR environment, the committee may consider creating mechanistic policies for DR software interoperability. (For example, they may define how to move a reference transaction "thread" between library systems. The committee would not create policy standards defining how DR is managed within a local library system.)

Lynch also identified several key DR issues:

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  How will libraries route DR queries?

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  Libraries need to "articulate the bounds of reference." We need to define the type of questions that stay within reference and when (and where) to refer. To do so, we must connect with outside services to improve this definition.

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  Libraries should explore the idea of information communities: the personalization of a system based on a person's interaction with that system (e.g. the way Amazon.com customizes the user's page based on previous user queries). There are issues of privacy, but such systems come to regard the user's history as a strategic asset. Libraries have different motivation, but perhaps the information can move from database to database (e.g. user-related metadata could be transferred through queries from database to database to benefit the search process.)

Reference Awards Ceremony

The following three awards were presented during a reception on November 12:

1. 1.

   Exemplary Digital Reference Services 2001:

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     QandAcafé, Golden Gateway Library Network

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     Ask a Librarian, Houston, TX, Public Library

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     InfoPoint Digital Reference Service, University of Minnesota Libraries ­ Twin Cities

2. 2.

   VRD 2001 Director's Award:

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     KnowItNow, Cleveland, OH, Public Library and CLEVNET Consortium. The KnowItNow live online reference service is available to CLEVNET library patrons 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It was launched June 11, 2001 (as covered in LHTN, Vol. 18 No. 8.)

3. 3.

   VRD 2001 Conference Student Paper Award:

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     Adrian Johnson, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Texas at Austin, received the award for his paper, "User-centered reference services: usability in academic library e-reference sites."

General Session, Day 2

Thinking of Starting a Digital Reference Service? Get Real!

Susan McGlamery, Coordinator for Reference Services, Metropolitan Cooperative Library System (MCLS), Project Director, 24/7 Reference Project and Nancy O'Neill, Principal Librarian for Reference Services, Santa Monica Public Library.

McGlamery presented an update on the progress of the 24/7 Reference Project. The Project is LSTA grant funded and offers real time reference 24 hours a day, seven days a week through a consortium of libraries throughout southern California. Public, Academic and K-12 schools are currently involved.

The scope of 24/7's service is quick answer rather than in-depth reference transactions. Within such a framework, they hope to be able to answer questions within 15 minutes. A follow-up policy (via e-mail, phone, and fax) allows them to ensure that successful service and subject specialists are available for referrals.

As of October 2001, they had handled approximately 3,500 calls. A total 65 percent of the questions were classified as general reference (breakdown: 33 percent homework help, 8 percent local history, 4 percent government and 20 percent follow-up), 33 percent library-specific, and 2 percent other.

For the future, they are making connections with libraries in other parts of the USA to creatively staff a 24/7 service (e.g. EST libraries can provide early morning service to PST patrons). They are also working with CDRS to provide second-level reference referrals.

O'Neill highlighted some of the issues that need to be addressed for real-time reference to be successful. In a playful, debate-style configuration, McGlamery and O'Neill posed issues of concern and possible solutions. Following is a summary of selected points:

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  It is important that libraries have the infrastructure necessary (hardware, staff, and commitment) to commit to DR. You will also want to explore whether your patrons will be able to utilize DR: do they have home computers, Internet connections, the technological sophistication and the need?

In response McGlamery reported Pew Research Institute Statistics that show that 73 percent of youth 12-17 years old have Internet access.

O'Neill pointed out that peer review is "a foreign concept in many libraries." The 24/7 Reference software allows libraries to store DR transcripts for review. Will performance evaluations be based on our real-time transactions? How will this information be used? McGlamery emphasized that we should not overlook quality in our rush to offer DR. With access to so much information, perhaps we can evaluate our performance more carefully and improve on the 55 percent rule.

In summary, infrastructure, service costs, service hours, staffing, assessment/quality control, cost analysis and setting up reference networks/consortia are all areas to be addressed when starting a real-time reference service.

The significance of DR is evident in the success of this Conference as well as the increasing number of DR librarian positions sprouting up across the country. I met several librarians whose sole responsibility is to manage and participate in DR service. You can review the complete VRD 2001 Conference proceedings when they become available on the VRD Web site (http://vrd.org/conf-train.shtml). I highly recommend that anyone interested in the future of library reference services attend this valuable conference next year.

Heather Tunender(tunender@lib.uci.edu) is the Electronic Reference Services Librarian at the University of California, Irvine Libraries.