I've wanted to give patrons the control to share their questions and answers for a long time. Since switching to new software, we have the tools to do it and this week we're making our tentative first steps.

When I polled to see if they wanted this feature, they said 'yes', but I never asked why.

Patrons might have as many reasons for sharing copies of their virtual reference transcripts as they do for using reference services to begin with:

• they are working on a group project
• they want to be able to bookmark it to find it later
• they want to make the world a better place by contributing the end result of their chat with a librarian
• sharing is self-expression

Can you think of any more?

To get started, I first updated our privacy policy to include a section on sharing.

Sharing questions and answers

You may be asked for permission for this website to share your question and answer.

If you choose to share your question and answer, your personal information will still be kept confidential, including when your name and e-mail address if they appear in the question, answer, or session transcript.

This website may choose not to share your transcript for any reason.

Next I added radio buttons asking if we should share their question and answer or not, with the default being 'no':

Sharing:

Share my question and answer
Keep my session confidential

I think a checkbox would take up less space and do the same job (and check out my ugly description of it all), but I worry that people would check it automatically.

I'm not an expert in user design (and our whole website really needs a look from some information architects - know any?), but my experience has been that some users will fill out every field on a form and sometimes enter fake information even when fields are optional, and I want to be sure the permission we get is explicit.

There's always a lingering fear that people will try to share "inappropriate" things, or even that someone will ask a libelous question, but more to the point, if we published every question on this website, a lot of people would get the idea that we only answered questions for kids, and even if that seems true sometimes, it is not. I don't want to make it harder even harder to reach adults than it already is.

The idea is to solicit a few questions and then use those to highlight as examples of what kinds of questions people ask. We'll see what rolls in over the next few days and decide what to post.

This is a conservative, tentative approach and its main shortcoming is that if it is at all successful, Emily and I will have to review all of those wanna-share questions.

But if that happens, we can work on the next step of allowing patrons to create accounts on oregonlibraries.net and giving them the power to manage their own questions, including turning sharing on or off. This will also enable patrons who ask a lot of questions to point librarians to the conversations they've already had.

From there, the limitations are boundless (did I really write that?) The boundaries are unlimited! Um, yeah. I'm excited!

For example, we use Drupal to run this site, and there are existing extensions (modules) to Drupal that would:

• Provide quick links to share transcripts in del.icio.us, digg, etc
• Let People self-organize into groups (Ms. Tucker's math class, Nursing 101)
• Create RSS, RDF or other XML versions of transcripts that can be mashed up with other resources and services

Given some developer-time, we could build create modules for Drupal that might:

• Create automatic bibliographies for resources cited in sessions
• Connect to bibliographic software like Zotero, RefWorks and EndNote
• Create some version of Dave Lankes' Scapes idea
• Integrate with social networking sites like FaceBook and identify platforms like OpenID and Yahoo! Fire Eagle

I don't think most users would take advantage of most of all this. The core of what we are going for is to give patrons the power to share, including with future librarians they work with in follow-up to their initial question.

Even if social networking and Web 2.0 tools are used by very few people, we still win: by publishing their transcripts online, those few people are helping the library leak out into the open web. Casual information-seekers will find library resources along with everything else that is out there. One answer can help many patrons.