From the Digital Reference post Presentation at Princeton:
“…I hope that I succeeded in my talk in focusing on four key points:
- For a variety of reasons, IM software (and widgets) are more popular than ever among libraries that want to offer synchronous online reference, as new digital reference services are launched using IM (as opposed to using web chat clients from QuestionPoint, Altarama, etc.) and other libraries (like Temple) are moving to drop their longstanding subscriptions to web chat software.
- The last few years have seen an explosion of new ways to communicate online with our patrons; pilot projects to try out these new tools and see what works are flowering everywhere. Some tools and technologies that either just launched this year or will very soon (such as Google Wave) are worth keeping an eye on, as they might expand the ways that we our patrons can reach us and enrich reference interactions.
- Collaborative reference services continue to grow and offer an institution a viable alternative to trying to staff an online reference alone.
- We need to find more ways to expose reference work to raise the profile of all our reference services. Much as Lorcan Dempsey has suggested we need to make (library) data work harder, we also need to make the traces of reference transactions work harder by repurposing and reusing them in various ways…”
