Reference Renaissance: Opportunistic Reference

The first session of August 5, 2008 at Reference Renaissance got off to a great start with:

Opportunistic Reference with Virginia Cole of Cornell's Olin Library; Bill "Slam the Boards" Pardue of Arlington Heights Memorial Library and Greg R Notess of Montana State University and the Search Engine Showdown.

Virginia provided an evaluation of patron usage of QuestionPoint's IM-like Qwidget vs. "traditional" chat reference. Cornell's experience is that introducing IM via Qwidget did not appreciably affect the number of reference transactions. During peak usage times, people looking for chat reference from Olin Library seem to split 50/50 for the IM Qwidget vs the traditional QuestionPoint interface. Patrons did seem to prefer the Qwidget for shorter questions. There was a clear preference for IM Qwidget for transactions between 100-500 seconds. Cornell analyzed their chat reference stats by type of question and found that IM Qwidget was prefered for holdings type questions (Do you have this book/journal?) while the traditional QuestionPoint interface was preferred for research type questions. There were more stats than I could write down and I encourage you to look at the presentation slides when they become available.

Bill Pardue was the next speaker and his topic was "Implementing Predatory Reference." He was a very friendly and engaging speaker who made us laugh as he talked about how some colleagues consider the term "predatory reference" to be creepy. He suggested that we should think of "predatory" like we do in nature films. Reference Librarians consume questions and we need to hunt them down whereever they are.

Bill suggested the following reasons to "go predatory" (i.e. outside the library):

• 90% of people identify libraries with books and may not realize we answer questions.
• People actually in the library might not have questions.
• People don't think of us for answers -- turn to search engines, friends, others.
• Users are going to Yahoo! Answers, Linked In and other places. Not library web sites.
• It's fun to "show our chops" in non-traditional forums.

Bill stated that the main point of predatory reference is to get patrons when they're not in the library. He spoke about AHML's efforts at grocery stores and other places. He said it was very important to consider your goals when sending librarians outside the library. Is your goal to provide reference or to meet people and promote the library? Both are worthy goals and not mutually exclusive, but in Bill's experience you need to make one or the other primary. Many of AHML's experiences focused on the meeting and promoting angle, in hopes that once people had encountered librarians "in the wild", patrons might think to contact users in the library.

According to Bill, three common strategies used in predatory reference are:

• Get out!
• Lurk and Leap.
• Weasel your way in.

As examples of getting out, Bill offered the "Answer Cart" used at George Mason University and Penn State. It looks like a hot dog stand, goes to campus events and dispenses information. He conceded that Academic libraries might have it easier because they have a captive audience in the dorm rooms. But he offered these possibilities for public libraries:

• Local Restaurants, like Panera
• Teen/Senior/Community Centers
• Nursing Homes
• Mall Information Desk
• Fairs, Festivals
• Grocery Stores

It is important to get permission from venue owners first and to be aware of any territory issues. Supplement what they do. Don't try to replace it unless they ask.

Lurk and Leap is a strategy suited for online reference. This is the essential strategy of the Slam the Boards project that Bill spearheads. Some ways to lurk and leap include:

• Commenting on local blogs when a question of fact is involved.
• Commenting on newspaper web sites when a question of fact involved.
• Get non library pages to carry your virtual reference link.

Weasel your way in is to join organizations and offer your research assistance. Bill offered the following examples/possibilities:

• Enroll one or more of your librarians in college Blackboard-based classes like Arizona State University does.
• Join a village/city committee and offer to do fact-finding and other research.
• Join your local Chamber of Commerce to learn about local business issues, take questions and talk up the library.
• Hold a pub trivia contest like Jessamyn West did.

Bill concluded by leaving us with two questions to ponder:

• Will doing predatory reference generate lots of questions and are we prepared to answer them all?
• Should we be paying a librarian to do this sort of stuff?

My notes for Bill end at this point, but with the second question I think he suggested that perhaps paraprofessionals could answer many of the ready-reference type questions generated by our promotional efforts. This was a theme I head a lot during the conference. More about that later.

My one regret about seeing Bill Pardue at this conference and introducing myself to him was that I forgot to ask him about astronomy. According to his bio he is an avid amateur astronomer and as much as the cloudy skies of Juneau allow me, so am I. It would have been fun to talk astronomy with him.

Ok, back to the program. Greg Notess was an energizing speaker. He gave a similar talk at Internet Librarian a few years back that a colleague talked about in glowing terms. I thought I got it then, but hearing it direct from Greg energized me anew.

Greg's talk was titled "Quick Screencasts for Distance Reference" and included references to materials available from his site at http://www.notess.com/screencasting/.

He basically said that librarians shouldn't let themselves be paralyzed by perfection when it comes to recording screencasts. It is possible to make a quick, good enough video for situations like:

• Responding to reference questions by e-mail, especially in situations where you'd normally type multiple steps to access a resource.
• To provide a quick instructional video. Databases change so quickly that you shouldn't feel bad about making quick videos that might a slight problem here or there. People won't likely notice and it will be time to make a new video in a few months anyway.
• To show tech support exactly what problem you're having with a particular program. Not only does this document the steps you've tried, but it may intimidate vendor front-line staff to immediately escalate your problem to a supervisor.

Greg mentioned a number of software packages that you can use to record video and all of them are listed at http://www.notess.com/screencasting/software/. For commercial software he recommends Camtasia. For free options he recommends Jing, although an audience member state she *hated* Jing based on last year's release.

Some tips that Greg offered:

• Go lightly on the editing. Aside from speeding the production process, it will keep you from having a very choppy video.
• Don't record full screen. Just select what is absolutely needed. Recording full screen not only increases your file size, but it encourages people to try and figure out what other software your computer is using.

All in all, a very interesting session. Hope to put some of "good enough" concepts into both personal and professional projects.

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Note: By August 20, 2008, all of the presentation slides and handouts for Reference Renaissance will posted to the conference site at http://www.bcr.org/referencerenaissance/index.html. Later in the year, Neal-Schuman will be publishing conference proceedings. I’m looking forward to those, since I (or anyone else) could only attend 1/6 of the offered sessions, plus the Keynote and the Plenary Session.

Also, as I write up sessions, I very much welcome comments and corrections. Just as I was physically unable to attend all 36 sessions, so too I might not have picked up on everything in the sessions I did attend or I might have accidentally misinterpreted something. Or maybe you’ve got a different take on the session you’d like to share.