collaborative enterprise instant messaging at ALA midwinter - part 2, a new software infrastructure for remote public service

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

I am continuing 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.

See also part 1.

Current collaborative virtual reference tools

I've used a few different software tools for collaborative virtual reference, but I know the most about OCLC QuestionPoint, having switched our service to the software a little over a year ago.

QuestionPoint's software grew out of the Collaborative Digital Reference Service, a 1998 pilot project led by the Library of Congress. The software was designed specifically for e-mail referral between different library systems. It’s robust if that’s all you are looking to do.

In 2005 when QuestionPoint began absorbing the 24/7 Reference cooperative, a chat virtual reference service that was competing with QuestionPoint's chat component, but that had also lost a major part of it's funding.

So QuestionPoint grafted an existing collaborative chat service onto an existing service for e-mail referral, providing a "best of breed" software product for all of it's new and existing customers.

One problem that I've run into is that since the chat system is a graft, and not at all a separate system, is that all of our chat reference questions have to also be processed in the e-mail referral system. For example, a question "closed" in the chat service also has to be "closed" in the e-mail system.

To some libraries, QuestionPoint is quick to point out, this is an advantage. There is one place to review all of your transcripts. I like this too, but poor reports, poor privacy controls and no searching means that we have to export them all anyway.

Anyway, I like that the services are integrated, I just don't care for their being interdependent.

As QuestionPoint is trying to balance what I want as a customer-member, what other customer-members want and what their own staff see as the future possibilities and directions of virtual reference, many libraries are deciding that "free" instant messaging services are a much better value.

OCLC has been talking about integrating IM into QuestionPoint at least since the fall of 2005, when I met with them at the most recent VRD conference. To their credit, they are still talking about it.

But given QuestionPoint's current model, I don't see how they are going to pull off integrating IM without making the software even more complicated. Even if they do, then what? Are they going to add text messaging, voice-over-IP, and whatever new communications methods come at us over the next two, five or ten years?

And let's forget about OCLC for a second. I've used software from Tutor.com, Altarama and poked around at Docutek, a SirsiDynix Company's VRLPlus, and I'm not convinced that they are in a position for libraries to adopt new modes of communication either.

A better way is to choose an extensible and pluggable model. By 'extensible', I just means the capability to expand. By 'pluggable', I mean that we should be able to add on new technologies without disrupting our current system; I also mean 'unpluggable' - we don't just want to bundle chat, e-mail, IM, knowledgebases and reports, we want to bundle any chat with any e-mail with any IM with any knowledgebase with any reports with anything else.

I think we can achieve this if we base our systems on human collaboration, open source software and official and de facto standards.

But who am I fooling? Just because you have your library catalog in MARC records doesn't mean you can transfer them from one ILS to another.

I do not think that it will be easy, but I do think it could possibly be cheaper for libraries, create a more stable service, and be a safer way to keep patron records confidential.

A key component to this system is Enterprise Instant Messaging, which I will talk about in part 3, Instant Messaging and Enterprise IM