a repertoire for the future of virtual reference services

Depending on which statistic I believe, 64-80% of our patrons are K-12 students. We've grown quite a bit in the last two years, but success is mostly localized in a handful of schools and districts. Students are often repeat users, and usually, many students with the same assignment will contact us separately. Even if 20,000 kids use L-net, we don't come close to reaching the 540,000 K-12 students in Oregon.

This fact makes me question basing our virtual reference on a call center model. In our call center, each patron/caller connects individually to a librarian. This is great for providing individual, professional and confidential service and I love that, but it is not so great for trying to serve many people at the same time, not when we can't predict when they're going to need us and when we don't have nearly enough staff to do it.

Take an example class visit, with 30 separate kids asking the same (or similar) questions, but being connected to 30 separate librarians, what we have is a mess. I think L-net and cooperative and QuestionPoint backup librarians do a fine job of serving these patrons individually, and I don't mean to deride anyone's work, but I don't think it's the best way to serve the students.

For starters, at least 10% (on average) will have technical problems. Another few will have to leave before the answer is given, a few will joke around and come back for an answer another time, and a lucky few, maybe a third, will get an answer they can use. Meanwhile, those 30 librarians aren't talking to each other while it's happening, aren't sharing resources, so we end up with a lot of duplicated work.

I don't think virtual reference services needs to be wholly re-purposed to serve our growing masses of K-12 students, but so long as that is who we are serving, I think we could apply a better model to do it.

Another strike against our call-center model is the fact that we can sustain the level of growth we've seen in the last two years. On top of that, we aren't reaching older teens (though I've been told it's normal for libraries to not reach teens), and I don't think we're doing a marvelous job reaching adults, either.

People want to find things for themselves, and self-service is a natural for the web, so and I think it's time we embraced it. We'll reach more general users and save on resources.

On the self-service web, call centers can be flattened. Sites like Yahoo! Answers, Ask Metafilter, and the Korean search engine Naver's Knowledge iN (see Wikipedia for an english-language description) allow a group of people to provide answers to questions for each other.

Libraries don't necessarily have to adopt the community-to-community model, especially if we want to relish and embellish our roles as experts. Instead, let's explore that rich, gray area in between our current private one-to-one reference services and those public many-to-many Q&A sites.

For example, we can:

• Maintain and publish a knowledgebase of question and answer pairs. Here's a search box for QuestionPoint's Global Knowledge Base:
  

• Publish completed chat transcripts (with permission from patron and librarian). Allow them to be bookmarked, downloaded, and remixed.
• Enable patrons to collaborate instead of forcing them into 1-on-1 chats. 30 students with the same question could ask a single question, together.
• Let multiple librarians collaborate on a single answer.
• Publish a directory of resources used to answer questions - use Rollyo or Google's Custom Search Engine, or collect the links on del.icio.us, tagged with keywords from the transcript.

And all of this doesn't have to be e-mail or live chat or Instant Messaging, though of course it can be if that's what patrons want.

I don't want us to give up on our individual, professional and confidential one-on-one service, but I'd love to see us expand our repertoire.