What Joe was doing while at the ALA Annual Conference 2007 in Washington, DC [Part 2]

This is a continuation of yesterday's post by the same title, Part 1.


Sunday, 6/24/2007

8:00 a.m.: Meeting of the RSS/MARS Virtual Reference Service Committee. At this conference we met at the Hotel Washington during the larger MARS All-Committee meeting. By the way, MARS stands for the Machine-Assisted Reference Section. MARS and RSS are two of the six sections that make up the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA), which is a division of ALA.

We had several items on our agenda, but these I think are the most interesting to share:

• We finalized plans for the program that the committee took the lead on sponsoring the next day, "See It, Hear It, Touch It: How do Communication and Learning Styles Affect Virtual Reference Service?" More on this later.
• I shared the proposed description for the program the committee will be sponsoring at next year's ALA Annual Conference 2008 in Anaheim, CA. The topic of "trust in VR" was decided upon at our meeting this past January at Midwinter 2007, so having a written description was the next step. Some committee members had shared ideas between then and now that were incorporated into the description. Now that the program has been approved, we can still tweak the description over the next several months, but here's what we have currently. Title: Please Talk to Strangers Online: Spreading Trust in Cooperative Virtual Reference. Description: Will another library or vendor staff make my customer happy? Will they come back after their experience? Does it make a difference if an academic or public librarian picks up the question? What about our patrons? They trust Wikipedia. They trust Google. What do we do to make them trust us in the same way? A lively panel of VR leaders will explore the issues, present their experiences, and recommend strategies relevant to all types of libraries. We don't yet have any speakers lined up, but will try to firm up at least 3 people before the end of July. Please let me know if you have someone in mind.
• Buff Hirko, chair of our "Tutorial" subcommittee gave an update regarding the Virtual Reference Adventure. This is an online interactive tutorial developed by the Washington State Library last year. This Tutorial was then turned over to ALA RUSA so that it would be available to anyone in library-world who wanted to use it for free. The VR Committee is now responsible for maintaining it. She is looking for more people who would like to work on the ongoing maintenance, especially from people who can bring a public library perspective. (If anyone working with AskUsNow! would be interested in participating, please let me know and I'll share your contact info with Buff. I know that she'd very much appreciate it and I think it would be a great experience for those interested. She's a great person to work with.) The tutorial can be found at: http://cs.ala.org/ra/vr_adventure/

10:30 a.m.: MARS Chair's Program - Harnessing the Hive: Social Networks and Libraries. I really wanted to attend this program in full, but unfortunately got there about half way through. It was a packed ballroom too - with many of us hanging at the doors in the back and sitting along the walls. When I came in, speaking was Tim Spalding, the creator/coordinator of LibraryThing. In general what LibraryThing does is to allow people to search for books based on the tags (personally created subject headings made by other searchers, in a way). Some libraries have even started to use LibraryThing as a search tool integrated as part of their catalogs because they see that the tagging works better than DDC or LC indexing in some ways. Sorry that I missed the presentations by Matt Bejune and Meredith Farkas, who both spoke about aspects of using wikis in library service. I hear that they were very interesting.

1:30 p.m.: RSS New Reference Research: the 13th Annual Reference Research Forum. The research forum has proven to be a great learning opportunity and I now make it a point to attend it at each Annual conference. There were three sets of speakers this year.

Marie Radford and Lynn S. Connaway presented "Not Dead Yet! Ready Reference in Live Chat Reference." They've looked at a set of 850 chat transcripts made available through QuestionPoint (stripped of identifying information) and coded each by the type of question. As it turns out, Ready Reference is the second most frequently seen category of question - so those who say that ready reference is going away really aren't correct in that assumption, or else they just aren't considering that these questions are being asked in the online VR format instead of face-to-face. From many-to-few, here's the quantity of questions as classified: Subject Search, Ready Reference, Policy & Procedural Questions, Holdings Questions, Research, Inappropriate, Directional, and finally very few Readers Advisory. By the way, the question coding system used by Marie and Lynn was developed by Julie Arnold and Neal Kaske, former AskUsNow! providers, while they were at the University of Maryland College Park Libraries.

The second presentation was by Sarah Maximiek and Erin Rushton of Binghamton University Libraries (NY) on "Evaluating the Quality of Instant Messaging" service at their university library. They did something very similar to the previous study mentioned, but used the question categorizing scheme to code the questions that had come in through their IM service. One interesting thing I took from their presentation is that the librarians will often leave a session open (without closing it) and often the student will come back. I'm thinking more and more that our AskUsNow! customers likely fit the same model, where they assume that like in an IM format they can drop in and out without the transaction being terminated. While most of us are ready to end the chat if we haven't heard anything from the customer in a few minutes. We may be having different expectations of the interaction than our customers.

The third presentation was by Beth Evans of the Brooklyn College Library on "Library Websites / Library MySpace Profiles" and by far this was the longest. I don't think many people minded the length of here talk though, as she was giving some great creative examples of what libraries have done to interact with their customers through use of library MySpace pages. It gave me lots of ideas regarding our Maryland AskUsNow! MySpace page that I'd love to do. I think a main point from Beth is that you need to make sure to decorate and embellish your page as much as you can. Some libraries are using a plugin to provide a catalog search box from their MySpace pages and some are also using a plugin to provide a Meebo widget to allow IM chat with a librarian from the page. If someone leaves a comment on your MySpace page, you need to reply to it, otherwise it seems like you're not paying attention. You really also need to post to the blog on the MySpace page frequently. Two great examples are the Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library (KS) and the Bracken Library at Ball State University MySpace pages. There's a really clever video on that Bracken Library page geared to helping students understand the difference between scholarly and popular articles too.

5:00 p.m.: Informal get-together of members of the QuestionPoint Users Council (QPUC) and the 24/7 Reference Advisory Board, of which both Julie and I are members of both. This was held at the restaurant Zaytina. While there, I think I was able to convey some of our concerns about the limitations and difficulties of getting reports and statewide survey results. During this conference I've also recognized that interest among libraries nationwide to integrate commercial IM with the structure of 24 hour staffing has reached a high point. I made mention of this during the get-together as well with some on the QP team and I think that they were receptive. It's really going to need to become a priority for them in the coming year, I think.

[To be continued in Part 3]

-Joe