When I was at the ALA annual conference last month, I went to several sessions on virtual reference. This post collects links to some of those presentation slides and a few other blog posts about the sessions.

The QuestionPoint blog has a post on the Best Practices in Virtual Reference program that provides summaries and links to the slides for “Shared Expectations: Getting Comfortable, and Providing Quality Service in Cooperative Virtual Reference” by Marie Radford and Lynn Connaway, “Eliminating Barriers to Service” by Heather Muller, and “Tripping Over Reference: The Importance of Link Placement (and other stuff)” by Bill Pardue.

The RUSA Virtual Reference Committee sponsored a program on chat reference with Eileen G. Abels, Marie Radford, Lynn Westbrook, and Joe Thompson as speakers: See it, Hear it, Touch it: How do Communication and Learning Styles Affect Virtual Reference Service? Slides (ppt), Handout 1 (pdf), Handout 2 (pdf)

The presentations page for the “Seeking Synchronicity: Evaluating Virtual Reference Services from User, Non-User, and Librarian Perspectives” project provides links to the slides and handouts used in five presentations at ALA. There are MANY more presentations listed on this page; all appear to have slides linked.

Marie Radford gave several presentations on chat reference at the conference and she updates Library Garden readers on those presentations in these posts:

Over on the L-net blog, Caleb Tucker-Raymond discusses the Questionpoint Chat2 interface that Heather Muller presented on at the conference.

The QuestionPoint blog also provides a summary of the QP User Group meeting.