2009 Oregon Virtual Reference Summit Reads

A list of books, articles, and web sites mentioned by speakers at the 2009 Oregon Virtual Reference Summit.

Ahniwa Ferrari

Stephen Francoeur. My Workshop on Effective Chat Reference.

Buff Hirko and Mary Bucher Ross. Virtual Reference Training: The Complete Guide to Providing Anytime, Anywhere Answers. Chicago: American Library Association, 2004.

M. K. Kern. Virtual Reference Best Practices: Tailoring Services to Your Library. Chicago: American Library Association, 2009.

R. David Lankes. New Concepts in Digital Reference. San Rafael, CA: Morgan & Claypool, 2009.

Marie Radford. Virtual Reference Bibliography.

Various Authors. “Reference Renaissance: Current and Future Trends.” Speaker’s Presentations.

Allie Flanary

L. Bedwell. "Making Chat Widgets Work for Online Reference." Online 33.3 (May 2009): 20-23.

Rachel Bridgewater and Meryl B. Cole. Instant Messaging Reference: a Practical Guide. Oxford: Chandos, 2008.

M. K. Kern. Virtual Reference Best Practices: Tailoring Services to Your Library. Chicago: American Library Association, 2009.

Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki.

D. L. Meert and L. M. Given. "Measuring Quality in Chat Reference Consortia: A Comparative Analysis of Responses to Users' Queries." College & Research Libraries 70.1 (2009): 71-84.

L. Taddeo. "R U there? How to Reach a Virtual Audience Through Affordable Marketing Strategies." Internet Reference Services Quarterly 13.2 (2008): 227.

Eva Miller

Tim Brown. Change by Design: How Design Thinking Can Transform Organizations and Inspire Innovation. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009.
Discusses the value of using proven, repeatable "design thinking" processes to better understand problems and solve the right ones the right way. Brown is from IDEO, a design firm famous for their creative process. He believes design thinking is a sure way to transform organizations and be truly innovative.

Cathy De Rosa, OCLC, and Et al. Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources: a Report to the OCLC Membership. Dublin, Ohio: OCLC Online Computer Library Center, 2005.
A clear wake-up call about where people get information and how they think about libraries as a source of information. Based on extensive survey work.

Mike Kuniavsky and Morgan Kaufmann. Observing the User Experience: a Practitioner's Guide to User Research. 2003.
A great practical guide to doing solid user research that gets at who, what, where, when, why, and how and finding all of those unexpressed needs people share with you when you learn to relax and let them talk. It's art and not science. Kuniavsky will make you a master of listening well.

George Lakoff. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1990.
A great read for librarians, though rough sledding for anyone else. It's all about how we make sense of the world through categorization. It's a natural human tendency to clump things into groups as shorthand and may have a lot to do with our success as a species.

Grace Paley. "A Conversation with my Father." The Collected Stories. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2007.
This story is the ultimate expression of empathy for others. Paley does not believe that character determines fate. Our fate is in our hands, and she stuck to that philosophy in all of her wonderful stories. This is a good badge to wear in your work, too. We tend to slice and dice people by demographics, like socioecononic group, ethnicity, or age. When you take a mental models approach, what matters most is someone's internal view of a process or activity, not anything about their external self. As librarians, we know that you cannot ever determine the extent of someone's intellectual adventurousness by looking at them.

Indi Young. Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior. Brooklyn, NY: Rosenfeld Media, 2008
Describes a process for creating a strategy for your product or service based on user research. Very practical: takes you step-by-step through what you need to do to collect and analyze user research in a manner that results in useful "mental models" of your customers or clients. These aren't demographic: they are behavioral, and show where you may have gaps or opportunities to craft products or services that delight people and meet needs.

Nicholas Schiller

Nicholas Schiller. nnschiller's OVRS Bookmarks.

Clay Shirky.
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. New York: The Penguin Press, 2008.

Aaron Schmidt

Adam Greenfield. Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. Berkeley, Ca: New Riders Publishing, 2006.

Bruce Sterling. Shaping Things. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2005.