Implementing Digital Reference Services: Setting Standards and Making it Real

Citation

Butterwick, N.B. (2003), "Implementing Digital Reference Services: Setting Standards and Making it Real", Performance Measurement and Metrics, Vol. 4 No. 3, pp. 123-124. https://doi.org/10.1108/14678040310507897

This book stems from the Third Annual Virtual Reference Desk (VRD) conference, held in Orlando, Florida in 2001. Prior to publication in this volume the papers were revised and updated to reflect current technology and practice. It is aimed at librarians and researchers and claims to represent “the cutting edge of work, practice, research and thinking in the digital reference community”.

A chronological approach to the development of a digital reference service is used to group the chapters into a logical structure comprising six parts. This facilitates investigation of any of the major phases of the development process.

Part 1 presents two papers dealing with the identification of the need for digital reference services. The first of these deals primarily with the need to address the expanding use of e‐mail to pose reference questions in a museum library. The second is a case study of the DOSFAN digital reference service which has federal depository libraries at the University of Illinois at Chicago answering e‐mail queries for the US Department of State Web site. The authors state that “the new paradigm for federal depository libraries is a shift in focus from distributed collections to distributed services”. This new paradigm must surely be applicable to many types of libraries.

Part 2 is about managing key digital reference issues – specifically, artificial intelligence, privacy and copyright. For me, a highlight of this section is a paper entitled “Exploring virtual reference: what it is and what it may be”. This gives a very useful summary of the development of virtual reference services, following the progression of e‐mail, “Ask A” services, online pathfinders, “chat” and real‐time live Web reference, including collaborative online reference.

In Part 3 the issues involved in implementing real‐time or “live” reference service in the digital domain are considered.

Part 4 deals with collaborative reference services, including one paper which describes a project to implement a live Web reference service in 90 days! Another paper focuses on the Library of Congress’s Collaborative Digital Reference Service (CDRS) and highlights in particular the importance of copyright, licensing arrangements, privacy, standards and metadata, the profiling of expertise, strengths or resources, and the routing of questions among participant libraries. This article also focuses on the service level objectives and quality standards made by OCLC as it was developing its pilot services, which were ultimately to lead to the OCLC Question Point service.

Part 5 deals with the key findings from research in digital reference. The papers here range from a description of the OPAL (Online Personal Academic Librarian) project at the Open University to consideration of the importance of taxonomies and ontologies in building an information and referral system.

The final section, Part 6, deals with the important topic of evaluating service quality in the context of digital reference. This section begins with a useful review of the literature on this topic and is followed by papers on the assessment of quality in digital reference services, user‐interface and accessibility issues and a comparative study of “ask an expert” and “online reference” sites.

This is an extremely useful collection of papers. They range from those which are firmly routed in practice or development to those with a more theoretical approach, including performance evaluation and measurement. While some newer commercial services have become available since these papers were written the relevance of the content remains intact. This volume provides an excellent overview of the issues surrounding the implementation of digital reference services and can be recommended both to researchers and practitioners.