shinylib

Connecting to Users with Chat & Texting

I was really looking forward to this session for a number of reasons. I wanted to see Joe Murphy speak (we met in Anaheim at one another’s poster sessions) and I’m resolutely convinced that txt reference could really fly at PCC. By this point in the conference I was really understanding the distinction between chat (vendor-chat) and IM reference services and was wanting to catch the comparison of vendor-chat services to free IM services. Sadly I missed part of that session because I’d been chatting with Jamie LaRue. Ah well.

I had to dash out before the end of this session to catch my airport shuttle and head back home. This means I slammed the laptop shut when I got a txt message telling me the shuttle arrived early and was already boarding. Apparently I forgot to save my draft before doing so and lost most of my notes. Fortunately Joe wrote a guest blog for Tame the Web which talks about the Yale Science Library text a librarian program. Essentially Yale SciLib (and some others, as you see in the comments) launched a texting program and decided that the best option was actually to purchase a mobile device rather than a subscription service that forwards SMS to email/IM. Continue reading…

Outreach, E-Learning, Resource Guides

I was hoping that the first presentation, on providing library services at Multicultural student services centers would help me figure out the next steps to take with a virtual outreach project I am trying to coordinate via the library website, involving student services providers at PCC. It did not, but did at least give me hope and faith that student services providers can take an interest in how the library can work with them to the benefit of our students. The UNM program is a physical outreach project, but many principles work the same: flexibility, visibility, marketing, etc.

Other speakers provided information about services at their libraries that are not transferable or relevant to PCC at this point. University of Colorado – Boulder has developed an in-house database that provides access to library FAQs, course guides, and subject guides. They are having success with this approach and are able to keep better statistics on what students are searching for and can shift the metadata attached to their guides to get students to existing guides that meet their needs but were missed based on the search strategy used. This has interesting implications, but ultimately isn’t what we want to do, I think. I was put in mind of Jared Spool’s talk at Online NW this year, I got the impression from him that search boxes can cause some issues, but I haven’t looked at the UC-Boulder page to see exactly how they have implemented the search feature. Continue reading…

Opportunistic Reference

Lots of talk of that QuestionPoint qwidget going on at this conference. I didn’t realize how many folks were into this vendor-chat thing. Overall I think I’m more interested in bringing IM to our virtual reference offerings. We participate in L-net and I firmly believe in the importance of the service, but I do believe that our students are going to be more apt to use IM. Actually, I’m most convinced that we need to figure out txt reference, but that’s another post.

I really appreciated Bill Pardue’s (slam the boards) talk on predatory reference. As he said, think of it as a nature film: we are question-eating animals. I love that! We consume questions and we need to hunt them down. It may have been once upon a time that our potential users had nowhere else to go, but that is not true any longer. Consider services like ChaCha that are actively stalking our prey (questions). How do we connect to our patrons when they are not in our buildings, virtual spaces, and other ‘expected’ locales? We need to be in the quad, at the caf, over by the gym, in the coffee shop, etc. See the notes on this section for a brief overview of what some academic folks have been doing. Hey bosslady, can we have a hot dog cart, too?! (Or one of those bike ice cream carts, as I quipped on Facebook)

Kudos to Greg Notess for actually making me take an interest in screencasting (libcasting as he calls it). I had really been yawning at this idea for quite a while now, but I am starting to see the light.

Continue reading…

Organizing People & Software Options for Maximum Service

Another session which really illustrates the differences between chat reference and IM reference. Interesting that M. Kathleen Kern reports patrons choose IM over vendor-chat 7 to 1. I understand the limitations of most of the existing IM services, but I’m not sure I see why they developed their own client. I suspect that they were simultaneously developing alongside clients like libraryh3lp and Hab.la, both of which are now freely available and solve many of the issues that prompted them to design in-house in the first place. Also interesting was her discussion of why collaborative VR is worthwhile, even on a single campus.

USC libraries contribute to an OCLC QuestionPoint similar to L-net and still wanted to explore the IM options in addition to the vendor-chat method. Most interesting about this decision was the belief that users should be able to stay in their native chat environment and not have to come to the library website to use the chat service. Other presenters indicate their agencies approached this in different ways, some deciding that forcing users into the library website is the most effective way to provide service and others, like USC, deciding that it’s a barrier. I come down firmly on the side of it being a barrier. If I can get you to remember me as a resource just by getting into your buddy list once it seems far more effective than forcing you onto the library website. Continue reading…

VR Varieties: Specialized, Blended, & Academic

I suppose I hadn’t really grokked the difference between “chat” and IM reference before this conference. Chat reference is used to refer to using some software suite such as QuestionPoint that offers services such as archives/transcripts which can be emailed to the user, some statistics on usage, co-browsing, etc. IM is the use of one of the major IM services (gtalk, AIM, yahoo, MSN, jabber, meebo) to provide limited, but perhaps faster transactions.

I was especially interested in the challenges K-state reported to rolling out IM. Across the conference it seems as though there are reasons to choose to provide chat or IM services. In terms of PCC, I think that IM would be a good option. Many presenters note that IM users self-select and thus understand the limitations of the service–not as apt to ask in-depth questions. Also, IM is (mostly) free whereas a full-service chat suite is gonna cost ya. Continue reading…

Innovative Approaches: Shaking, Sharing, & Spanning

This group of presentations was the first of the sessions I attended. On the whole I didn’t find anything that I can really apply to my environment. I was pleased to see an example of how another library has used video teleconferencing to provide reference service. This has come up a few times now, but I don’t think it will work for PCC…at least not any time soon. It seems expensive and like something that is really going to work for some extra large agencies, but again not too much for us right now.

Here are my notes, slides will be available at BCR soon. Continue reading…