Karin Smith
Information Services Librarian
Charles Sturt University
Bathurst Campus
 

“…we must become pivotally involved in providing point-of-need reference service to information seekers at the point where they are when they have a question.”

“By aggressively and imaginatively repositioning ourselves to provide immediate, interactive point-of-need service to remote users – whether they are in or out of the library, whether the library is open or closed – we will not only be doing right by our clients, but we will also ensure the flourishing of a grand diversity in information services” (and also help us keep our jobs! KS)

“…rather than thinking of our users as remote, we should recognise that it is we who are remote from our users.”

This is the challenge that Anne Lipow presented to the Australian online community at Online and Ondisc in January this year. It means getting out of our comfort zones and changing our thinking. It means utilising the Internet in a proactive way and going beyond our walls to serve clients who we can't see and who can't see us but who still need assistance finding information. This paper is about the implications of making these changes.

Some of the services that can be offered to “remote clients” include email reference, telephone, online (text) chat, and desktop video. Many libraries offer an email service from their home page. This is a way to reach out to users allowing them to ask a question at their convenience and allowing librarians to answer questions in a time that suits them. Email services are not "real time" and therefore have certain disadvantages such as the inability to clarify the question with the user and that answers can be time consuming to type when they would be quick to say.

“Chat” is another technology that has been embraced by people using the Internet. It is not especially appropriate for this purpose because you can't share applications. The only advantage  is that it offers a real time presence.

I want to concentrate on “point of need” services in this paper because the issues are much more difficult and challenging and involve considerably more than putting an email address behind the link to “Ask a Librarian”. By “Point of need” I mean that when the person requires help they can communicate with another human being who can help them. This can be done over the Internet using desktop video technology which, in an ideal world, allows for real time interaction when the person actually has the information need.

Charles Sturt University is a multi campus, regional university. It is the largest supplier of distance education in Australia with about two thirds of its students studying by this mode. The CSU library offers a standard reference service to students and staff who come into the library, but with access to the Internet, more and more, they can do much of their searching away from the library. Distance education students often don’t have the luxury of being able to come into a library at all and we offer a freecall phone service when the library is operational and an email “Ask a librarian” service.

My motivation for a remote reference service comes from the image I have of a student studying by distance. He or she accesses the Internet to use databases late at night. The kids have gone to bed, and they finally get time to study, then waste time due to inefficient searching. This would cause high levels of frustration in an already difficult situation. My image is supported by feedback from students when I give classes during residential schools. The students tell me that searching databases without any assistance can be a hassle and wastes time.

My vision is to offer an interactive, convenient service for these students to make studying slightly less of a pain and hopefully keep them studying with us. Convenience is an important issue and is an advantage the Internet can offer over a traditional library. It is conceivable that we could offer a service for these students at any time at the click of a button without the person having to even move away from their desk!!!

That is my “pie in the sky” vision. On a more manageable level, we have undertaken a project this year to test the viability of a remote reference service. CSU is creating an Interactive Learning Centre at a campus at Dubbo. There are few teaching staff and no librarians, the only staff are a part time administrator, a study skills adviser and high powered Internet connections. Locally based CSU students come in and study by distance mode.  The study skills adviser is often required to help students use databases but he feels his skills are limited. Our project is  to use NetMeeting to provide a reference service from the Bathurst campus library to these students.

NetMeeting is a free Microsoft product that allows interaction between computers on the Internet. It allows for a video image; sound; typed chat; whiteboard but most usefully it allows for sharing programs. This means that a student could be searching the databases and the librarian can look at what they have done and suggest different approaches. It lends itself to the teaching part of a university reference service and less well to ready reference questions. NetMeeting wasn’t the only program for this jo nor the best, but it is adequate and was appropriate for the trial.

At the time of writing, there had been a small number of reference interactions using the technology and they were deemed very successful by all participants - the librarian, students and study skills adviser. This technology is not perfect, but it is quite reasonable to use it as a way of solving the problem of providing a library service to off campus students.

I will now present some of the issues and practical implications of this service – a person to person virtual information desk. I will discuss technology issues; the impact on the actual reference service and staffing issues.

What technology issues affect the service.

Bandwidth.

At our Dubbo campus there is a microwave link to the university which means we have large amounts of bandwidth. One of the CSU lecturers has very successfully used NetMeeting to give classes from Bathurst to groups of students at Dubbo. Bandwidth tends to be the word that comes to the mind  of  Information Technology  people when you mention NetMeeting.  The reality is that it doesn’t hog bandwidth, but uses large amounts for very brief amounts of time according to the interactions. If used over a modem it is slower because there is less available bandwidth. Articles that discuss interactive reference services written in 1995/96 relate clunky technology as a factor in the service’s success or lack of it. This has improved by 1999 and will improve further with time, especially as business starts using this type of product.

Will our users have this technology on their computers?
 
The reason we are using NetMeeting in our project is that it is free, it even comes as part of Windows 98. The most basic part of the service is easily available to students with current technology. You can’t offer this service if the people don’t have the software at their end.

Other relevant equipment is a microphone and a camera. Sound is essential to the interaction  to add  a personal touch and also an extra, important layer of communication to allow for the actual reference consultation. You don't need a special  microphone, you can actually even use headphones from a Walkman, although it is easier at the library's end if you have a hands free headset. The visual  component is useful in establishing a social presence, but is not really necessary to ensure the success of the service. The quality of the image is not high enough to allow for nuances of facial expression and really only provides the information that the person at the other end is human. It is possible to put a still photograph or pause the image to establish that social presence and  reduce demands on bandwidth.

One of the problems, of course, is if the remote student is having trouble using the databases because they are technophobic, then they probably won’t be rushing to use NetMeeting. When desktop video becomes universally used in the same way that email has, then we can expect it to start taking off and “virtually” replacing our information desks.
 

Some thoughts about the reference interview and reference service.

The nature of the question

Perhaps a little simplistically, I have divided reference work into two areas, the first is teaching clients how to effectively find information and the second is providing answers or information sources to answer questions. The bulk of time taken at the reference desks at CSU involves showing people how to use databases, the Internet and catalogue to find information for assignments. Ready reference still accounts for a sizeable proportion of enquiries but the major proportion of time is spent teaching.

The limited experience I have had with remote reference showed that it has the potential to be successful. The first interaction occurred when a training time was set up with the study skills adviser to see if NetMeeting actually worked. He happened to have a student who needed help there and then, so the training session turned into a full-on NetMeeting reference consultation. As is common at this institution, it turned into a session about searching databases.

The student and librarian could both see the database search screen and either could take control of the mouse whenever appropriate. Sound was essential to the interaction. It is so much quicker and less cumbersome to say something than type it. This is especially important for the reference negotiation. We intuitively reiterate the person's question as we draw out what they really want to know - imagine typing all this. Not only would it be very time consuming but very soon it would feel silly!

One thing I observed is that it is important for both parties to establish a time when the interaction can be put on hold and the person can have a go by themselves. We could combine this service with some user friendly training materials so the person can read them in their own time to enhance their learning. Except that nothing beats just being told how to do the searching and not having to do the thinking for yourself!

How does this medium work for ready reference enquiries? This is  more difficult. Often the answer to the question will not be immediately apparent and the librarian will have to do some searching. The presence of the client at the information desk can sometimes be a bit of a hindrance but both the client and the librarian live with that situation. If the client is sitting watching the screen as I am searching around the Internet I will feel very self conscious. We may also need to go to the shelves to find information (!). The client will need to be put on hold while the searching is done. We will need to get back to them with phone, NetMeeting or email the answer when it is found and this may or may not feel satisfactory to both parties.

Can the computer act as a reference desk.

If we are going to conduct reference services over the Internet both participants need to be comfortable with the technology and realise its limitations.  At the information desk the reference librarian can sense from their stance and other visual cues that a person is nervous, confident etc We are not given this information using NetMeeting. We have to work harder to obtain this information through the interview and that is why the audio component is important. It is not as much for the tone of the voice as to be able to say the little things that help draw the person out.

How skilled are reference librarians at using the Internet to answer questions?

Although by no means always the case, more and more,  the librarian will be on an even keel with the client who is Internet savvy and has already checked search engines and other resources to attempt to answer the question before asking for help. There is a logic to the organisation of the library that means that a librarian could work out where something is by understanding the system – the Internet throws that out the window.To maintain a competitive edge we need to stay one step ahead of the general public regarding information retrieval using the Internet – that is easier said than done in a user friendly, accessible information scene. With more demands being placed on our time we have less time available to surf the net to find potentially useful resources.
 

Staffing and management implications

The Internet is very new and there is no parallel in history for a virtual reference service. Our work patterns as reference librarians have centred around an information desk, a phone and recently email. To double up with a parallel service requires a change in mindset for both management and reference librarians. The same amount of staff will be required to do twice the amount of rostered work. It is unlikely that we will get more staff to do it so we will be doing a new job as well as our old one. Have we got time?

The nature of reference work is that the better the service the more busy we will be. This rethink of our tasks is an opportunity to analyse the work we do, how long it takes us and then prioritise it. We could also ask ourselves why we are even offering the service and what is our competitive edge as information retrieval experts in this changing environment.

The Internet allows us to be less bound by our building, the technology offers us opportunities to work from home if we are happy to only use the Internet in our information searching. In the case of CSU, librarians at all campuses could be timetabled for the service. It doesn’t matter to the client where the person they are speaking to is sitting.

It is vital that we actively promote the service. It might pay us to learn from techniques used in target marketing to work out how to get the service to potential clients. In the meantime, clients who use the Internet to "go" to our libraries must feel as able to use the "Information Desk" as those who physically come in. The "Information Desk" must be as prominent on the Internet as it is in the library. We need clear, friendly icons that stay visible wherever you are on a library online site.

The bigger picture – providing a 24 hour a day, 7 day a week (24 x 7) service

This brings me back to my original motivation of the student I mentioned earlier. Many students of CSU do their studying out of business hours and we also have a number of off shore students.

To offer a longer service means either co-operating with similar institutions around the world in different time zones or changing our work patterns to include night shifts. Either option requires substantial infrastructure change. To create a co-operative arrangement we need to identify organisations in the different time zones and obtain their commitment to serving our clients. (Which, among other things, raises authentication issues.) In the spirit of co-operation we would need to be committed to serving the clients of other institutions, but not in a reciprocal arrangement. Our students might be assisted  by a university in Perth, but we would be helping students at a different university in New Zealand. Requests would come in during busy times, and management and library staff have to be prepared to give priority to invisible clients who are not even our own!!!!

Conclusion

I have outlined some of the practical issues with implementing a point of need reference service to library clients for whom the library is remote. Although I haven’t got the answers, most of these issues are nt insurmountable. It is quite feasible to offer this type of service and it will get easier as the technology becomes more streamlined.

The biggest hurdle is the psychological barrier that the client is not “in our face” and therefore easy to ignor We need to havev e the attitude that these clients are as relevant and important as the clients we can see. As people can find their information without coming into libraries it is in our interest to provide an "in their face" reference service.
 
 

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