This past Sunday at ALA Midwinter in Seattle, I hosted an unofficial event, Collaborative Virtual Reference and Enterprise Instant Messaging.

I am going to try to summarize my presentation and discuss the outcome of the session. I am working from notes, so this version will be slightly different than what I actually said.

I am breaking the presentation into several parts because it is too much for me to try to write at once.

The goals of the session were:

1. L-net wants to stimulate interest in a pilot project to host a virtual reference service using locally hosted enterprise instant messaging software that will allow libraries to manage web-based and IM services simultaneously.
2. Attendees interested in a pilot project should leave the meeting with information to discuss the idea with local stakeholders.
3. L-net wants to gather feedback on the proposed pilot.

I believe that the best thing virtual reference has to leverage is people.

Background - where did chat reference come from?

In the late nineties, there were few businesses offering live chat customer service. The clothier Land's End, shown here in 2001, was a notable pioneer.

As early as 1998, Tom Hanks romanced Meg Ryan online in You've got Mail. The title indicates the film is about e-mail, but additionally, our co-stars exchange instant messages, fall in love, and mainstreams the idea of semi-anonymous online chat.

Steve Coffman and Linda Arret, in their infamous article To chat or not to chat (Searcher, Vol. 12 No. 7 — July/August 2004), indicate that online chat for customer service never really took off, and suggest that it never really will, spelling doom for live chat virtual reference

"After all, if these commercial reference services armed with venture capital money and marketing clout could not make a go of it online, what does that say for [libraries'] chances? And if people have so far proved largely unwilling to embrace online chat for banking, insurance, retail, and other sales and customer service applications, what makes us so sure they will embrace it for reference?"

A few years later, 20 states at least one Canadian province and a few whole countries sponsor (or have sponsored) virtual reference chat services, and many more libraries offer chat reference of one kind or another without being part of a larger collaborative.

Meanwhile in the commercial market, Land's End still provides chat customer service, and you'll occassionally find other companies as well, internet giants like eBay as well as the little guys, like custom fortune cookie maker My Own Cookie.

Then there is LiveJournal and MySpace, which both provide instant messaging services, not for customer service, but as a way of enhancing their communities.

At the same time, more and more libraries are turning to instant messaging as a low-impact virtual reference chat solution, requiring little training. What's more, instant messaging beats even collaborative services as the most affordable way to provide chat reference.

This worries me - the fewer reasons libraries have to collaborate, the less opportunities libraries will have to leverage our greatest asset, staff.

Part 2 - a new software infrastructure for remote public service