Our conversation archive, a publicly accessible archive of transcripts of L-net patrons with librarians, is now live.
I'm borrowing heavily from Dave Lankes' discussion of the library as conversation at the 2009 Oregon Virtual Reference Summit - virtual reference is literally conversations.
Anyone can answer questions, but librarians help people to ask the right ones. Through conversation! Instead of giving answers that say "what is", we are trying to show "what's possible".
In the last 10 days, 152 of 1,100 patrons (~14%) have agreed to let us share their transcripts. Of those, we've shared 26 (with 55 more to review as of right now).
As I was going through the initial batch, I came up with some quick criteria:
We will share a conversation if:
The patron give us permission
The transcript is scrubbed of the your personal information
A polite and helpful conversation takes place
The conversation may be of interest to Oregonians
"A polite and helpful conversation" means no pranks, no abrupt disconnects, and always-helpful librarians. This is the rosy-glasses virtual reference.
Included in what may be of interest to Oregonians are questions about specific libraries, current homework assignments, etc. We probably don't need to include this, but I like the way it sounds. I may have a future in bureaucracy yet.
I will now set up the RSS feed, and a randomizer to show a question on our front page.
Oh, and did I mention we had 1,100 questions in the last 10 days? Zoinks!
I am thrilled that the patron was willing to share this interaction. Not only does the librarian do a great job, but in thinking about what kinds of questions we want to highlight, I decided that one of the things we want is to put out content that is going to attract our patrons when they are searching the internet, ie, questions about Oregon and things of interest to Oregonians.
I did my best to make the transcript look as much like our chat as possible. I am sort of enjoying this display more than the regular 'buzz' version (compare to www.oregonlibraries.net/ask/124654) - what do you think?
One of the issues is that the style of our site has nothing to do with our chat interface, so the fonts are smaller. I think it will soon be time to redesign our site.
Another issue is, if we are removing screen names, what do we call people? Do patrons know they are called 'patrons'? I played with calling the patron 'you', 'person', and 'patron', but decided on 'anonymous'. I decided to call the librarian 'librarian', though their regular screen name would probably do fine.
All of this would be moot if we weren't moderating the display of personal information. Of course patrons can be anonymous, but if they want to have a name, and if they want their name to be archived, that's okay too. And wouldn't it be nice to give credit to the actual librarian?
I'm trying to think what we can add to the basic archived-transcript screen:
- A link to ask a new question?
- a block listing extracted resources/URLs used in the transcript?
- an optional "answer" summary? (this means more work)
- comments
One of the librarians in Ohio who is helping with our service early mornings, evenings and weekends wanted to know how to find out what was happening in Oregon libraries.
For academic libraries, ACRL-NW "is a very lightly used discussion list comprised of ACRL members (and others)" in Oregon and Washington.
Another newsletter is the Oregon Library Association's OLA Hotline, which you have to be a member to get by e-mail; it is posted on a blog at http://olahotline.wordpress.com/.
We just got word that the State of Jefferson Scavenger Hunt will begin November 12, tomorrow. Scavenger Hutners have been a heavy user of L-net in the past, though that isn't always true.
If you have a shift between November 12 and November 20, please review the questions posted at http://www.sou.edu/youth/competitions/index.html (they will be available starting 11/12 at 9:00). You may wish to print out the list of questions or have it handy in a web browser so that you can quickly determine if an L-net question is on the scavenger hunt list.
More advice:
1. Remember, these questions are meant to stump everyone. Do not feel bad when they stump you, too.
2. Instead of providing answers, offer some hints as to how the kids might find them. What kind of reference source would you use to find the answer?
The students will all use the Southern Oregon Library Information System, www.solis.lib.or.us, and you can suggest catalog searches to get them started (is this still true? Do they use SOU now?)
3. Please be patient with students. If you get swamped, send them the ClassVisits message and ClassVisits url message.
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
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.
