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Bernie Sloan
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
When I found that I only had 20 minutes to talk I found myself thinking "What could I do with my 20 minutes that might be helpful to you in the audience?" Given that there is a wide variety of experiences-- people dealing with electronic reference services, I thought that one of things I might do is briefly discuss some sources that I found helpful and some things that you can take back with you to use as references too, as you are involved in electronic reference, email reference, and video reference projects. What I will talk about differs from what's going to be in the paper that's going to be published as part of the proceedings of this gathering. I thought that what I would do is to come up with what would probably be helpful to those in the audience. If you look in the upper right hand of the handout it gives URLs for two web accessible resources.
The first title "service perspectives for the digital library" is a paper I did for a doctoral seminar at the University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science. We had been talking about digital libraries-- particularly librarian-user collaboration in the context of digital libraries. The title of my paper is fairly specific about what I am trying to get across. I am not talking about electronically based reference resources. I am talking strictly and specifically about services, the kinds of services that people can provide whether it's through video reference or email reference. One of the things that I thought was interesting when I was doing the literature search for the paper was that if you do a lot of searches for electronic reference, even electronic reference services, you get back a lot of references about electronically based resources, and not necessarily services. Finding papers that deal specifically with the service aspect are a little tougher to find. I started out in my paper defining the digital library. I came up in the literature with literally dozens of definitions of what people thought a digital library was. Almost invariably all of those definitions talked about digital resources, they talked about digital library as a place where you access digital resources. The human element did not seem to enter into it. It was almost as if could you run a digital library without people, without reference librarians, without intermediaries. Users would directly access the information and would not need any guidance or help.
I found dozens of definitions of the digital library that worked along those lines. In my paper I also discussed the human aspect of digital libraries. While there are a lot of definitions of digital libraries that left people out, I managed to find quite a few authors who touch on this issue and all of whom say digital libraries and digital library resources will need a human touch, will need a librarian or intermediaries, depending on who was doing the writing. I also go on in this paper to talk about reference services in the digital library and I discuss a number of studies on various aspects of electronic reference service. I provide links in the web version of the paper to about a dozen library electronic reference sites. These are examples of how individual libraries have handled electronic reference in the past. They were all web-based sites and they range from fairly simple sites to more complex sites. It is not just the smaller libraries that have the fairly simple sites. A number of larger institutions had fairly simple things where basically you just click on a button and a form pops up to ask the question, without any guidance beyond that. I talk about developing a model for electronic reference services. It is a two pronged approach. One deals with interactive video. It's starting out at specific sites with limitations. The ultimate goal is to expand those services to every user's desktop. Electronic reference models are supplemented by electronic mail reference service. The other URL that you see on that one slide concerns library support for distance learning. You may be wondering why I include a lot of references to library support for distance learning. This URL is a web site I did for a project partially involved with my doctoral program, and partially involved with my work to come up with a resource of web accessible literature dealing with library support for distant learning. You might wonder how that fits in with electronic reference service. The people who are doing library support for distance learning are used to working with people at a distance. What they've come up with over the years is transferrable to the provision of electronic reference services, even though you only may be providing them to people who are affiliated with your institution. At that URL, I have a lot of usual generic information dealing with library support for distance learners, so I won't belabor that. There a couple of things at this Web site that might be helpful to people who are doing electronic reference service. Of the most interest to those providing electronic reference services is a list of links to about 60 libraries and institutions that provide distant learning support to their users. I think this is really helpful to go through, to see the kinds of things they have done and also how they've tried to blend traditional resources and electronic resources in support of their users. The second point is less obvious. This web site offers links to about 50 web accessible papers and articles dealing with library support for distance learning. I think that people who are involved in developing electronic reference services might want to take a look at those papers because there are a lot of good points made in those papers that are also directly transferrable. In one paper, the author makes the case that people have been doing library for distance learning may be the best equipped to begin address the provision of remote reference service.
On my handout I have also indicated sites for two good papers that were presented at the ACRL conference in Nashville, and that deal with a couple of experiments about providing reference service through interactive video. The first is by Kathleen Folger at the University of Michigan and describes what they did in this project to provide reference services between the undergraduate library and the University of Michigan residence halls. They set up two-hour sessions two evenings a week for two semesters. After they were done with this experiment, they found that fewer than 20 students used their services and wondered why. So they started to investigate why students did not use their service. The points she makes in this article are worth considering, especially before people start to develop interactive video reference services. A number of the points were: inconsistent quality and video, lack of adequate technical support, and that librarians and users could not see each other's screen displays (in the process of helping people, people like to point at screens). There was no way to do this kind of virtual pointing at the screen display. I had a professor in my doctoral program who would go around and look at screens in the reference department and find the one that had the most fingerprints on it. That was the one that he would choose to use to observe how people used systems, because he figured that was the place where the most collaboration took place. Another thing that Folger found was that some students and staff were self conscious about being on camera and that got in the way too.
The second paper I've listed on the handout concerns a project called Interactive Reference Service at the University of California Irvine . They conducted video reference sessions between the science library reference department and the medical school computer lab, which was located about a mile away from the library. They used a fairly sophisticated set up, including the ability to see each other's screen, and a whiteboard capability where people could put in graphics on the screen. They also had "chat" facilities too. After they experimented with this for three months, they determined that the medical students really appreciated the service. A number of things in the paper itself talk more about their conclusions.
While video conferencing promises to be good vehicle for providing reference services for users, most of what's done now, and most of what will probably be done for some time to come is offered via email. One of the reasons why is that a lot of libraries and institutions really don't have the technical capability to provide very widespread reference service by video. On this slide I cite two articles that I think are really good. Both are from the same issue of RQ. I think they are both very helpful in trying to establish guidelines for setting up and evaluating a program. Eileen Abels' article dealt with a number of things. People should read the articles to think about they three things that she identified. She identified five possible approaches to the email reference interview. Of those five they picked out only one they thought was the best one and that had the term systematic applied to it. They suggest a model for remote reference request form. Going through and looking at libraries' electronic reference service web sites I find that most of the sites out there don't really include most of the elements included in Abels' model reference request form. Which also begs the question that if you put more and more into the request form in terms of what people have to fill out, will they be more likely to give up and think "I did not really want to know it that badly anyway". I think there is some happy medium between a detailed reference request form, and a simple pop-up email message with no guidelines whatsoever about what people are supposed to fill in. The reference request form I found at one library went on for three pages. They did remember to include a box that asked "What is your question?" But requested so much other information that I think a user might started to lose track of what his or her question was. In the Abels article something that is interesting is that after an analysis of her study she offers a model remote reference interview. I think this is something really helpful to take a look at. She talks about the different steps of the model remote reference interview. The second paper I cite, by Laura Bushallow-Wilbur talked about a study which was done to show how people used email reference. They treated some basic research questions along these lines. For example, who uses email reference? They found that graduate students led the way with 44% and faculty 35%, and they also noticed a gender disparity in the use of electronic reference services. 75% of those submitting questions were male and 25% were female. Part of that disparity might have to do with how they have set up their study: largely people on the science side and maybe that caused some of the imbalance, but it is an important point to consider. What types of questions? This is not a case of just using electronic resources, but using all the different resources that are available traditionally to reference librarians. They asked the question "When are the questions transmitted?" They found out that 90% of the questions that were submitted by electronic mail were submitted between 10 a.m. and 5:00p.m. on weekdays. Basically the same time when the reference desk is traditionally heavily staffed. They also addressed the question of where people are transmitting their questions from. These percentages add up to more than 100 because some people submitted questions from more than one site: 65 % submitted them from their office, 48% from home, and 30% from a computer lab. Another interesting question they had is "What medium do they prefer?" Do email reference users prefer that medium or do they prefer others? 58% of the people involved said they preferred email, 37% preferred face-to-face reference encounters and most interesting is only 5% said they preferred telephone reference services. That is a most interesting point that people would rather do face-to-face than telephone interviews. And at least with this group, most of them really appreciated the email reference services .
Jonathan Grudin is a faculty member in the Information and Computer Science Department at UC Irvine. He presented a paper at the 1994 ACM conference - "Groupware and Social Dynamics." He identifies eight challenges for developers of groupware. While you can argue whether or not electronic reference is really groupware, I think the eight challenges he identifies can really help you in terms of setting up and evaluating electronic reference service projects. As I've listed them on my handout I won't go through all of them here.
1. The disparity between those who do the work and those who derive the benefit. There are different implications for groupware than for electronic reference services. But it does make the point of structuring that goes back to process, and structuring the email request forms, so you shift a little bit of the burden off the reference librarian at the beginning and put it onto the people who are trying to define their questions. If you have a set-up where somebody just submits an email with no guidance as to how they're going to do it, I think that probably winds up creating a lot more work up front for the reference librarian, trying to sort out what it is the person wants. Even if you set up a form that has some real basic elementary questions to help guide the person asking the question, I think that takes a little bit of the workload off the reference librarian and transfers it to the user.
2. Critical mass. You really need to know how things are in your institution in terms of critical mass, of who has access to the technologies that you're going to use. I think that's why interactive video reference services so far have been fairly limited Their use has been fairly restricted because there aren't many people who have those capabilities; you have to go to a computer lab, or be on a place on the network where they can really transmit interactive video back and forth. And so interactive video services have a tendency to be limited to specific places. But even with email reference services you also have to consider the critical mass issue. Who has access to email? What percentage of users actively use email? And so I think critical mass, studying when you want to start up with technology, for electronic reference services, is very important.
3. Social, political, and motivational factors. Probably everybody has at their institution people who would need to be motivated to participate in electronic reference services. It's a big issue to be considered, the social, political, and motivational factors, both in terms of what the community is used to doing, the wider community that you're dealing with, and also with library staff and with users to a certain extent.
The other thing, the last two slides, have to do with library guidelines for distance learning. I've given references to a couple of different resources. One is the ACRL site, the old 1990 version, and the other is the ACRL proposed revised guidelines; these were voted on at this ALA conference. Canadian Library Association guidelines for distance learning support deal with the provision of services to users at a distance. They also work hard at incorporating these services within the institution. In talking with people before, I've run across instances where people start up electronic reference services that are really not incorporated within the framework of the institution. It's kind of a personal thing, and when that person leaves, the service goes away, and the users wonder what's happened to it. It deals with distance learning and a number of different issues, but I think these would also apply to electronic reference services as far as mission, how they fit the institutional mission or the library mission.
Institutional support beyond the library says you're going to be using the technical infrastructure to provide these services, which in a lot cases is beyond the control of the library. And also institutional support within the library, staffing support to make sure that you have the proper staff to provide the service as well as staff with the training and also technical support which I mentioned is a big issue; and finally fiscal support. And I think I'm at my 20 minutes right now...Thank you very much.
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(10/21/98)