To Chat or Not to Chat — Taking Yet Another Look at Virtual Reference, Part 2

@article{citeulike:143387, abstract = {Unfortunately, chat reference has not turned out to be the panacea many of us hoped for. Studies by Joe Janes and others show that the numbers of questions asked on chat reference services are, generally speaking, abysmally low. Janes' Census of Digital Reference finds chat services get a median of just six questions per day and evidence gathered from a broad spectrum of other libraries shows similarly low levels of usage — even among services that have been up and running for several years. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule, with a few services reporting thousands of questions per month. However, most of these reports come from collaborative services made up of many libraries and, on closer inspection, most of the individual libraries making up the collaboratives show the same low levels of use seen in other virtual reference services.}, author = {Coffman, Steve and Arret, Linda }, citeulike-article-id = {143387}, journal = {Searcher}, keywords = {chat, digital, libraries, reference, virtual}, number = {8}, posted-at = {2005-03-31 00:55:28}, priority = {2}, title = {To Chat or Not to Chat — Taking Yet Another Look at Virtual Reference, Part 2}, url = {http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/sep04/arret\_coffman.shtml}, volume = {12}, year = {2004} }

TY - JOUR ID - citeulike:143387 L3 - citeulike-article-id:143387 TI - To Chat or Not to Chat — Taking Yet Another Look at Virtual Reference, Part 2 JF - Searcher VL - 12 IS - 8 N2 - Unfortunately, chat reference has not turned out to be the panacea many of us hoped for. Studies by Joe Janes and others show that the numbers of questions asked on chat reference services are, generally speaking, abysmally low. Janes' Census of Digital Reference finds chat services get a median of just six questions per day and evidence gathered from a broad spectrum of other libraries shows similarly low levels of usage — even among services that have been up and running for several years. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule, with a few services reporting thousands of questions per month. However, most of these reports come from collaborative services made up of many libraries and, on closer inspection, most of the individual libraries making up the collaboratives show the same low levels of use seen in other virtual reference services. KW - chat KW - digital KW - libraries KW - reference KW - virtual AU - Coffman, Steve AU - Arret, Linda PY - 2004/// UR - http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/sep04/arret_coffman.shtml ER -