Saturday, September 08, 2007
What if I were a regular patron?
About a week ago, I was helping someone write a business plan and needed a couple of statistics to which we didn't have ready access. Poking around my local library's web site, I spied the link to our statewide virtual reference service, and thought I'd give it a try. Suffice it to say, I'm less than impressed.
After getting past the slow Java load, "Librarian Bruce" popped in. Librarian Bruce not only disappeared abruptly from chat (hey QuestionPoint, how about a little netiquette training?), he has yet to get back to us via e-mail as promised, even with a "hey, sorry, this is taking a little longer than anticipated."
This isn't necessarily indicative of the quality of Illinois virtual reference in general (and Bruce may yet come through), but, as I've talked about before, little things can make a huge difference in how we are perceived. If my experience with Librarian Bruce were my first experience with reference, with the resources on my local library's web site, or with a librarian, I'd probably be over at Yahoo! Answers right now and never look back. Every patron encounter, on- or offline, offers the chance to make an impression, and we need to pay attention to each of these interactions.
After getting past the slow Java load, "Librarian Bruce" popped in. Librarian Bruce not only disappeared abruptly from chat (hey QuestionPoint, how about a little netiquette training?), he has yet to get back to us via e-mail as promised, even with a "hey, sorry, this is taking a little longer than anticipated."
This isn't necessarily indicative of the quality of Illinois virtual reference in general (and Bruce may yet come through), but, as I've talked about before, little things can make a huge difference in how we are perceived. If my experience with Librarian Bruce were my first experience with reference, with the resources on my local library's web site, or with a librarian, I'd probably be over at Yahoo! Answers right now and never look back. Every patron encounter, on- or offline, offers the chance to make an impression, and we need to pay attention to each of these interactions.
Labels: questionpoint, reference, virtualreference, yahooanswers
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Over several years, my experience with "ask-a" services has had a 50% success rate. I've had some unbelievably weak answers. Half-right reference has ported well to the online world.
Somewhere... I cannot recall where... I saw a statistic that a library's virtual reference had a 75 percent response rate within the first minute.
Which means it takes a full minute for 1 out of 4 librarians to *initially* contact a patron. Which is a HUGE amount of time to sit there and hope for someone to respond. I don't know what the abandonment rate is at that point, but you'd have to have a huge amount of faith to wait a full minute for anything online.
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Somewhere... I cannot recall where... I saw a statistic that a library's virtual reference had a 75 percent response rate within the first minute.
Which means it takes a full minute for 1 out of 4 librarians to *initially* contact a patron. Which is a HUGE amount of time to sit there and hope for someone to respond. I don't know what the abandonment rate is at that point, but you'd have to have a huge amount of faith to wait a full minute for anything online.
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