CiL2008: Virtual Reference: Endless Possibilities

This session was about the different ways you can provide virtual reference at libraries, including but not limited to IM chat reference. Here's some of the products they discussed:

Hab.la is a free service that allows the chat box to follow the user around the Internet. It loads the library page within a Hab.la browser, so that the librarian can show the patron where to go and what to do. There's some problems, however - I think the patron has to download and install the Hab.la widget, the coding is a bit clunky, and only 5 Hab.la widgiets will display at any one time, so if you've got more than 5 chat requests coming in, some of them get lost. See comments for clarifications.

The company is also thinking about a pay-per-use policy, although they know libraries are interested and may be willing to cut them a deal. However, this type of virtual reference service is something to keep an eye out for in the future.

LibraryH3lp is an IM service being built by librarians for librarians. It runs on Javascript, is customizable, adn allows for multiple librarians to have windows open to the service at once. They all get notifications of an incoming message, and the first librarian to respond gets connected to the call. They're also looking at eventually instituting a fee for this service, but it's free for now. You can get an overview of what's available and what's planned at their overview page on their wiki, and you can see LibraryH3lp in action here. On that page you can also find a link to the PowerPoint slides from this session, on Slideshare.

Skype is a free VoIP (Voice over IP) service that essentially allows you to talk online with anyone who's got Skype connected. It's faster than chat, but the user has to have Skype installed, and you have to remember to log out. the University of Waterloo tested Skype for a while, but they only had 10 questions via it in the first month.


The second presenter in the session talked about using RSS feeds to create virtual reading rooms. The presenter said that students don't browse in the physical reading room, and that browsing ejournals is almost impossible. So he built an online reading room from RSS feeds for library literature.

You can find RSS feeds of new material from databases like Ebsco and other journal aggregators and from publishers. There are also online journals like Code4Lib that offer feeds. He created a mashup of the feeds using a service like Feedburner that aggregated feeds from 20 different library journals and served them all up in one feed.

Some services like Feedburner will email items from the newly-created feeds. Most individual journal feeds and publishers' feeds give abstracts of the articles. Ebsco feeds just give article titles.

A service like Grazr will take different RSS feeds and OPML files (remember the file that Walter had you load into Bloglines that gave you a bunch of different feeds at once? That's an OPML file) and makes a unique RSS feed out of all of those that you can post on a webpage - say you wanted to create a virtual reading room for Biology journals. You could find a bunch of Biology journal feeds from the pre-eminent journals in the field and create one feed from them using Grazr, then post that feed on, say, the Biology subject guide page for those who are interested in keeping track of new research and publications.

Pipes is another service that will do much the same thing.

RefWorks has a new service called RefAware that also monitors journal feeds and delivers those of interest to you, based on search strategies you provide. (As we already subscribe to RefWorks, this may be something to look into.)

ticTOCs is a service currently in beta that plans to gather journal tables of contents from RSS feeds and allow researchers to browse them. The coverage is not very extensive as of yet, since they only went live a couple of weeks ago.