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The December/January 2008 issue (pdf) of the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology has a special section on Virtual Reference Services. Contents of special section:
- Introduction by Yungrang Laura Cheng, Guest Editor
- An Informal History (and Possible Future) of Digital Reference by Joseph Janes
- Virtual Reference to Participatory Librarianship: Expanding the Conversation by R. David Lankes
- Evaluation of Online Reference Services by Jeffrey Pomerantz
- Implementation of Professional and Ethical Standards by Pnina Shachaf
- On the Trail of the Elusive Non-User: What Research in Virtual Reference Environments Reveals by Lynn Silipigni Connaway, Marie L. Radford and Timothy J. Dickey
A few blogs about chat reference or for librarians providing chat reference:
The presentations from the Collaborative Virtual Reference Symposium held July 31-August 1, 2007 in Colorado have been posted. Many include links to blog notes, as well.
I was so excited to read this post on the Library Voice blog about setting up MeeboMe widgets in Pidgin (formerly GAIM), free IM software similar to Trillian. It works great! It took me about five minutes to download and install Pidgin, the Meebo plugin for Pidgin, and set up my IM accounts. I have been using Meebo for all of my instant messaging, but I prefer using an IM client instead of always having to have a couple Firefox windows open for Meebo.
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:
- ALA Redux – Ready Reference in Chat – Not Dead Yet! PLUS 1 Foolproof Way to Increase Accuracy in Chat Reference
- Are We Getting Warmer? Query Clarification in Virtual Reference (ALA Redux Part 2)
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.
