Director of technology for the Shenendehowa Public Library in Clifton Park, New York.
kgs@bluehighways.com
Column for November 2000
You know those dreams where you can fly? I had that same exhilarating sense of freedom and power the first time I viewed live online reference in action. I haven’t seen anything this important or significant for librarianship since the first time I saw a graphical Web browser, sometime in 1993.
I’m not alone. “Digital reference is now,” Charles McClure wrote in a forward to Digital Reference Service in the New Millennium, a forthcoming handbook from Neal-Schuman that looks like a keeper.
This isn’t simple messaging; live online reference is far more highly evolved than e-mail reference, as I found out in a live session led by Steve Coffman, who through his company LSSI is assisting libraries in developing online reference services and is creating a commercial online reference service called Virtual Reference Desk that the firm will sell to libraries.
In this next-generation digital reference service, librarians can talk in chat areas, demonstrate Web sites, provide useful links, and “escort” patrons through elaborate searches—the crucial pedagogical role that is the sine qua non of reference. The online reference workspace is richly evolved; you can e-mail transcripts of sessions, store information about patrons’ interests, see who’s in line, find out who else is on duty, refer a question to a subject expert, and display links to Web sites related to the sessions. Despite the inevitable kinks to be ironed out, it works.
One of the cardinal and transformational rules of online reference is that the user isn’t remote; the librarian is. “Bring the answer to the patron,” says Susan McGlamery, reference coordinator for the Metropolitan Cooperative Library System, a consortium of 40 public libraries located in Los Angeles and Orange County that’s about to go live with an online reference project called 24/7.
Others concur. It’s the librarian’s job to meet the users where they are, to seek them out, to market in language intelligible and attractive to our target communities, and to customize services based on the users’ needs, preferences, and timetables, said Anne Lipow of Library Solutions Press, who is closely involved in training librarians in these new services in northern California. (As a former children’s librarian, I loved it that Lipow pointed to youth services departments as the models that proved the value of outreach.)
This isn’t a paradigm shift—it’s a shove. In live online reference, even the pace of work changes. Ronna Nemer of the San Jose (Calif.) Public Library told me that “going live” in a trial of a new reference service to be soon unveiled in the Bay Area was “scary, exciting, fun, and exhausting!” In an online reference session, as long as you have a user, you and your busy fingers are constantly working for the entire period on the virtual reference desk. Mental and physical exhaustion come very quickly, and staff can’t do anything else during the session.
The Library of Congress is in on it too, involving several dozen libraries in an advanced test phase of a project called Collaborative Digital Reference Service, the goal of which is to “use new technologies to provide the best answers in the best context.”
As LC and others realize, there is real potential for collaborative 24/7 reference on a national or even global scale—and collaboration is essential. “No library can do this alone,” says Lipow. The public libraries in Suffolk County, New York, are piloting a program called “Sunday Night Live!” On Sunday evenings from 5 p.m. to midnight, librarians using Human Click software are answering patrons’ questions. Meanwhile Danielle Hinton of the library at University of Leicester in the U.K. advised me that her school is also providing online reference. I began daydreaming: if Suffolk and Leicester collaborated, Leicester could use Suffolk for “mid-shift” reference coverage for panicked college students finishing papers at the last minute. I can hear it now: “Yo, mate! ’Ave I gotta Web site for you!”
Compare any library marketing campaign with commercial Web-based services such as Webhelp, which offer free, fast help, good answers, excellent marketing. We have to get “sticky”—to use marketing language—and pull in these users with assertive and direct marketing campaigns that explain very clearly why they want to spend tax dollars on what we have to offer.
Mull this over: The ability to move reference to an online model means it can be physically removed from the local library site—and thus outsourced. There are some exciting possibilities for communities too small to afford round-the-clock reference services. Think of a world where there are far fewer reference librarians, but they earn much, much more than the average salaries today—the word on the street is that the starting salary at the LSSI reference center will be $60,000. Finally, professional pay for professional work!
However, outsourcing also comes with its own baggage. There are legitimate concerns when for-profit companies manage services for not-for-profit organizations. I felt severely burned by Amazon.com when it abruptly changed its privacy policy to tell us that our personal information was for sale, but on one level I understood that Amazon doesn’t exist to help me find books: It exists to make money, pure and simple. If a company had to choose between the fiscal bottom line and intellectual freedom, or between its stockholders and patron privacy, what would it do?
As McGlamery puts it, “Our patrons are moving there, the content is moving there . . . we better get there too.” As we look at commercial and not-for-profit reference models, the nagging question is, who will get there first?