Virtual Reference Service: From Competencies to Assessment

Citation

Smith, A.G. (2008), "Virtual Reference Service: From Competencies to Assessment", The Electronic Library, Vol. 26 No. 6, pp. 929-930. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470810921727

This volume consists of papers presented at the 2005 Virtual Reference Desk conference, the final conference in the VRD series. David Lankes starts the volume with an overview of the VRD conferences, and how they helped develop a VR community. He points out that VR has been extremely well researched (possibly due to the fact that chat reference produces logs, etc., that are amenable to analysis), but this is a different issue from bringing the innovation into mainstream library services. He also discusses the importance of tools in implementing new services, for example the move to instant messaging (IM) from specialised VR tools.

Topics discussed include forming a virtual reference consortium, inappropriate use (such as “goofing around” or offensive language), interpersonal skills, and the boundaries between information provision and advice for legal and medical questions.

Some papers (for example those by Arnott Smith on triage taxonomy for medical questions, and Rios on the role of health sciences librarians) are not about VR, although there are possible implications.

The most useful sections of the book are two papers on training in VR skills, particularly Joann Wasik's chapter (which is about 40 per cent of the book) on a comprehensive VR training programme, the result of a three‐year project by the Digital Reference Education Initiative. The chapter presents three levels of competency – beginning, intermediate and advanced – and discusses instructional methods and competencies. This section will be of interest to those running courses in VR, either as part of professional library programmes, or on the job training. In addition, a short chapter by Rabina discusses an experiment in integrating VR into an LIS reference course which will be of interest to LIS educators: there were technical challenges in using real VR services, and there is a need for librarians to make more sophisticated use of internet search tools such as Google.

The papers do not seem to have been updated since the conference – with a few minor exceptions references date from 2005 and earlier. There seems to be an underlying assumption that VR is based in text chat, which seems unlikely given the growth in voice‐over‐IP technology such as Skype.

The VRD conferences certainly provided impetus to the development of virtual reference, but to some extent these papers are a snapshot in time, and reference service has moved on. Now VR is simply one of a number of developments in reference service, and it will be interesting to see what emerges from conferences such as Reference Renaissance (see www.bcr.org/referencerenaissance/), which has been heralded as a replacement for the VRD series.