I finished compiling a summary of our 2007-08 statistics, and we came in at 20,533 chat and 1,075 e-mail questions for the year, our busiest yet.

This is a 5% growth in our chat and e-mail traffic over the 2006-07 year. This is great! The only thing is, we were really expecting a 10% growth.

I'm excited for the new software tools and collaboration we'll be using in September, and we've been busy enough as it is, so I'm not at all worried - our service is getting better and better.

Still, maybe you want to know why we aren't continuing on our path of ridiculous unsustainable growth?

Well, we didn't do the marketing we had planned. Instead, we set aside our marketing budget for software development. Besides, part of the plan this year was to take advantage of discounted unsold prime-time television and radio ad space from the Oregon Association of Broadcasters, and after talking to them this spring, there might not be a lot of that to go around until after November's election.

I also feel strongly that any marketing we do this summer and in the fall has got to reach out to K-12 users and send the right messages - which in my mind right now are that there are only a few of us online, we save you time, it's fun, and we'll help you when you are stuck. But we have to talk to some teens before we decide how to do that.

Last, our Find tool is providing patrons with a first-stop, self-service option for getting research help from us. About 600 people have been using it each month since October. I honestly feel that if we're going to try to reach everyone in Oregon, that self-service tools are going to be the way to do it.

For more statistics, see our goals and objectives page for 2007-08 and our monthly statistics page. I also created a PDF (see below) detailing usage by academic library patrons.

Since 2004, librarians on L-net have shared over 3,000 different articles from Wikipedia with patrons. Wikipedia actually has over 2 million English-language articles, so 3,000 isn't that many. Wikipedia is still the number one source our librarians use (just ahead of multcolib.org, the website for the biggest public library in the state).

The most-sent articles are:

I ran this report once before, over a year ago, and I'm noticing that either I did this query differently, or we're leaking data. Twins, Cotton Mather, and the bombing of Dresden all should be on this list based on last year's numbers. Please, please, don't let it be leaking data. I think it's only a few duplicate and practice transcripts that got cleaned up.

On the plus side, it's great to see Bigfoot on this list.

Dave Lankes gave a great keynote today at the Oregon Virtual Reference Summit in Salem.

He's way ahead of us and posted the slides and mp3 audio of his talk on his blog. I hope we'll have the video soon.

I'll try to summarize what I got out if it from my notes. Lankes talked about libraries as being the in change business, and that it was our job to innovate, hence the title of the talk, "The Innovation Imperative".

He started out by talking about myths in libraries - that Melvil Dewey had the Decimal System come to him while sitting in church, that the Library of Alexandria was Great, and that public libraries are the cornerstones of American democracy. The myths aren't necessarily false, but they are often uncritical stories that help explain this crazy world we live in. We need to challenge these myths.

Besides change, he also said that libraries were in the conversation business. Conversation, he said, is how knowledge is created. But he asked, why, in virtual reference, is this knowledge supposed to be created with one patron and one librarian?

I heard a lot of people talking about this remark. Here is my take:

One-on-one, confidential reference services are necessary to provide a freedom of inquiry. Dave wasn't challenging this idea - he was attacking the reference desk model made virtual when we had the chance to do anything else - but it was my gut reaction when he asked, "why"? This is one myth I hold on to pretty tightly.

Not too long ago, a post on the blog Love the Liberry by The Liberry AKA Amy that when she found a barcode ripped out of an apparentley stolen book, she scanned it and found the book was How to Clear Your Adult and Juvenile Criminal Records.

Funny, right? But also sad and true. Whatever confidentiality library staff might have kept, the patron knew that she was not anonymous if she checked out this book. Self-checkout aside, at least one other person would know she checked it out - a clerk, a librarian, someone. The confidentiality we provide means nothing if patrons don't trust us.

At the same time, being with friends or peers can give patrons similar confidence to ask personal or embarassing questions. It's sort of like going with a family member to the doctors when you're expecting to hear bad news. Or how organized protests give citizens the courage to shout beliefs and slogans they would be too timid to voice alone.

More than that, two heads are better than one. We are a collaborative reference service, and how do we collaborate? By taking turns answering questions. We'd provide better service if each question were commented on or worked on by more than one librarian.

So, one to one reference is both necessary, even if mythical, and necessary to circumvent.

I'd like to see L-net do several things to encourage conversations beyond one librarian and one patron.

- Allow one or more patrons to join a chat room together with one or more librarians

- Encourage librarians to contribute suggestions to each other, especially on in-depth e-mail/webform questions (Web 2.0 software is good at this)

- Allow patrons to bookmark and share transcripts of their sessions

We should explore all this, try it out, and keep talking.

This is just one aspect Dave talked about and it's what I wanted to loosen from my brain tonight.

There was a lot more to the talk and everyone was energized. Listen in, and tell us what you thought!

Mary, one of our intrepid L-net librarians recently had a positive offline experience with an L-net patron.

My friend, 10 years old, came home SO excited last week and ran over to my house telling me to turn on my computer. She had just discovered L-net! She had to tell me and show me the transcript and how she had talked to a librarian and how helpful they were and all the information she got.

So, we went back onto L-net for another session and got cut off.

Today I received the librarian's follow-up email to us with additional resources. I will forward them to my friend when I get home.

I forget that kids can get really excited about this because we never see them-we're too busy interacting with them. She was so thrilled, wanted to get back on again right away and talk to another librarian…I think she's submitted the same question about 3 times because she loves collecting the information and everyone gives her something else.

It reminded me yet again, that we do good work.

Hooray! I asked Mary how how her friend heard about L-net. Mary, you can leave a comment if you want to tell everyone.

I am interested because I always assumed that patrons asking repeat questions were doing it because they were unhappy with their answers. It turns out that in this case, the patron was happy with the answer and experience, just hungry for more librarian.

I don't know what to call it, but I'm tickled that a Google search for L-net now turns up an expanded listing.