GOING LIVE Starting & Running a Virtual Reference Service STEVE COFFMAN GOING LIVE Starting & Running a Virtual Reference Service STEVE COFFMAN with contributions by Michelle Fiander, Kay Henshall, and Bernie Sloan American Library Association Chicago 2003 While extensive effort has gone into ensuring the reliability of information appear- ing in this book, the publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, on the accu- racy or reliability of the information, and does not assume and hereby disclaims any liability to any person for any loss or damage caused by errors or omissions in this publication. Composition and design by ALA Editions in Myriad Roman and Sabon using QuarkXPress 5.0 for the PC Cover photos and design by Angela Gwizdala Printed on 50-pound white offset, a pH-neutral stock, and bound in 10-point coated cover stock by Victor Graphics The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. ⬁ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Coffman, Steve. Going Live : starting and running a virtual reference service / Steve Coffman ; with contributions by Michelle Fiander, Kay Henshall, and Bernie Sloan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8389-0850-0 (alk. paper) 1. Electronic reference services (Libraries) 2. Internet in library reference services. I. Title. Z711.45.C64 2003 025.5⬘24––dc21 2003003616 Copyright © 2003 by the American Library Association. All rights reserved except those which may be granted by Sections 107 and 108 of the Copyright Revision Act of 1976. Printed in the United States of America 07 06 05 04 03 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS PREFACE v CHAPTER ONE Reference: The First One Hundred Years 1 CHAPTER TWO Getting Started: Designing Virtual Reference Systems 22 CHAPTER THREE Managing Virtual Reference Services 48 CHAPTER FOUR Marketing Virtual Reference Services 73 CHAPTER FIVE Where Do We Go from Here? 90 APPENDIXES A Software Feature Checklist 107 B Sample Pre-employment Screening Test and Key 146 VIRTUAL REFERENCE SERVICES BIBLIOGRAPHY 157 by Bernie Sloan INDEX 177 iii PREFACE I remember when I first laid eyes on virtual reference. It was back in 1997 and I was trying to round up speakers for the SCOUG’s (the infamous Southern California Online Users Group—for those of you who may be new to the field) spring workshop on new reference technologies. Chris Ferguson, then the head of the Leavey Library at the University of Southern California (USC), suggested that Lucent Technologies had some things that might be interesting and put me in touch with Bob Kent, who was then USC’s personal Lucent customer services rep. Bob invited me down to one of the Lucent Demonstration Centers for lunch and began to show off all kinds of new gadgets, electronics, and technologies that might possibly have some applications for reference. There were miniature wire- less headsets like the Secret Service wears that would allow librarians to work with patrons on the phone and roam the stacks at the same time. There were IVR (integrated voice response) systems that might be used to answer routine questions automatically without human intervention. There were knowledge bases and CRM (customer relationship manage- ment) software packages that might allow us to track what patrons were asking and capture the most common questions and answers so we would never have to answer them again. There were call routing systems that could handle thousands of questions per minute, and make sure they were all sent to librarians with the right skill set to answer them . . . provided, of course, the patron pushed the right button. And there was call center software that integrated the telephone and the computer so that agents could answer their phone by clicking a button on the screen, and the cus- tomer record and other information the agent needed to answer the ques- tion would be automatically pulled up on the computer. I told Kent it was all very interesting, but there was one pretty serious limitation. It was all based on the telephone, and although libraries certainly v vi Preface offered telephone reference . . . the telephone was designed primarily for talking and is certainly not the most effective method of sharing large amounts of information and content online. That’s why we invented the Web. “Ah ha,” Kent said, “then I have just the thing for you,” and he pointed out a couple of computers on the other side of the room. On one there was a mock-up of the Lucent website with a link that said “Have a Question? Click Here to Ask Me,” and it showed a picture of a call cen- ter agent. The other computer had the agent’s interface, which looked a lot like the call center software I had seen earlier, but this thing was also designed to accept “web calls.” Customers who clicked on Lucent’s “Ask Me” button would be routed to agents in the call center just like a phone call . . . only now, the agent could “push” information from the Web to the customers’ browser window, and guide them around the Lucent site or anywhere else on the Web using something called “co-browsing” technol- ogy. If the customer had a free line, they could talk with the agent on the phone while using the computer for co-browsing; otherwise they could communicate with “chat.” Although many of the functions were pretty rudimentary in comparison with some of the sophisticated virtual refer- ence software we have nowadays, I thought I could see in that early col- laboration program the core of a new technology that could allow libraries to move their reference services to the Web—if libraries could only be convinced to take advantage of it. I figured it couldn’t hurt to give things a little push in that direction, so I invited Bob up to show off the collaboration program at SCOUG—and it’s all been downhill from there. A whole lot has happened in the six years since I had that meeting with Bob Kent. I’m not sure what happened to Bob, but Lucent Technologies, which was flying high at the time, got caught in the dot.com and telecommunications implosion, and is now but a shadow of its former self. Its stock, which had been trading for over seventy-five dollars a share, is now going for little more than one dollar. And the real irony is that I don’t think they ever sold a single one of their web collaboration packages to libraries. In the same period, we’ve witnessed the birth—and then the death—of dozens and dozens of commercial reference services that aimed to replace libraries on the Web. Remember how worried we were when WebHelp introduced its live, free web reference services, and its CEO, Kerry Adler, said that his “Web Wizards” were going to be the new “librarians of cyberspace”? Well, WebHelp is still around, but it has “repurposed” itself to focus on BPO, or business process outsourcing . . . Preface vii which is a far cry from live web reference services, and those Web Wizards are nowhere to be found. And Mr. Jeeves and most of the other “question- answering” services have suffered similar fates. As for libraries . . . they’ve embraced virtual reference with open arms. Back when I met with Lucent in 1997, the first interactive reference ser- vice had just gotten started at the State University of New York at Morrisville . . . and all it could do was chat. There was no page-pushing or co-browsing, or any of the other interactive features we’ve come to rely on. Today, Library Systems and Services, LLC (LSSI) alone provides vir- tual reference software for several thousand libraries all over the world, and when you add in the libraries supported by all the other vendors now crowding into this field . . . there are probably now more than 4,000 libraries that offer live online reference services of one sort or another. And libraries are launching new services so rapidly that it is almost impos- sible to keep an accurate count. The technology has also evolved from “just chat” to full web collaboration, including file and application shar- ing, database authentication, and in some cases, even voice and video over the Internet. In the beginning, none of us knew the first thing about how to start and run a virtual reference service, so we just made it up as we went along. At first we made a lot of mistakes—like the ten-minute rule, initially insti- tuted by the QandACafe service in northern California, that said web ref- erence sessions would have to be limited to no more than ten minutes in order to help the librarians handle the thousands of people who they were sure would log in as soon as the service opened. Of course, we learned that we hardly needed to worry about being overwhelmed, and that the real problem was getting enough people to log in to our services to begin with . . . not how to restrict the amount of time we spent with those who were lucky enough to find us. But we have learned a lot in the past few years. Each library that’s started a new service has added a bit to our understand- ing and taught us a little more about how to handle virtual reference. The problem is that up until now most of that knowledge was locked up inside people’s heads, and the only way to get it was to call around and try to interview as many “virtual reference veterans” as possible. That is a hard way to learn about anything, and so this book is an attempt to collect and document what we have learned about virtual ref- erence in the past few years, to help make it easier for all of you who are coming after us. The information presented here is based on our collective viii Preface experience at LSSI in helping to design and develop several hundred vir- tual reference projects involving thousands of libraries of all types in coun- tries all over the world. I am especially indebted to Michelle Fiander and Kay Henshall, who contributed significant portions of chapter 3 and who helped me better understand how librarians and patrons were actually using the technol- ogy; and to Bernie Sloan for contributing his great “Virtual Reference Services Bibliography,” for all of the work he has done documenting the growth of virtual reference over these first tumultuous years, and for ask- ing some really good questions. Finally, even though our names are on the title page, in a very real sense, this book is by each and every one of the thousands of you who have worked so hard to build and run virtual ref- erence services all over the world. Some of you have spoken or written about it, others have posted to discussion lists, still others have designed systems or drafted RFPs, but many of you have simply worked hard to use this new technology to provide the very best reference service you could. Each of you—in his or her own way—has worked to make virtual refer- ence what it is today. And if it were not for all of you, and the work you have done, the problems you have solved, and the frustrations you have endured, virtual reference would not exist and neither would this book. But the story is not finished yet. We’ve all worked hard to get virtual reference off the ground in the past few years, but there are still many questions and issues to be resolved before we know whether we truly have what it takes to move reference to the Web, or whether these services we’ve fought so hard to launch will eventually wither away and die like those commercial services that preceded us. We still don’t know what would happen if libraries went all out to market their virtual reference services, or how they would handle the traffic if they did. We don’t really know how we are going to staff these services or how we will fund them when our grants run out. And there are complicated and difficult ques- tions that have arisen around issues like patron privacy, copyright, library cooperation, reference quality, security, and a host of others. These chap- ters have yet to be written, and nobody is quite sure yet how all of this might end. The only thing we can be sure of is that this is no time to rest on our laurels. If we are to succeed it will require the same vision, dedica- tion, and just plain hard work it took to get these services started in the first place. For all of our efforts, virtual reference is still very much a work in progress. Now let’s get going, for there is much to be done. C H A P T E R O N E Reference The First One Hundred Years Reference used to be such a stable and predictable area of library practice. For much of the rest of the library profession, the past few decades have been quite a wild ride. In the 1960s the development of the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) and cooperative cataloging revolution- ized the art of bibliographic control . . . and the lives of many catalogers. The advent of automated circulation systems radically changed the way we keep track of our collections and drastically reduced the number of staff we needed to perform these operations. The development of new automated acquisitions and serials control software has changed the lives of many bibliographers and serials librarians. But for the longest time, it seemed as if reference librarians were miss- ing out on all this excitement. When I first set foot behind a reference desk in 1985, reference had changed very little from what Samuel Swett Green had described when he first launched reference librarianship more than a century earlier. When I started, as in Green’s time, people came to the library because it was the single most important information source in the community. If a person had a question that could not be answered by a friend or in an encyclope- dia or almanac they might have about the house, they had no choice but to come and ask us—or go without knowing altogether. Of course, we didn’t always make it too easy for them to ask us. The library was only open during selected hours, so if you were unlucky enough to have a ques- tion in the middle of the night or on a weekend, you often had to wait 1