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Reference and Outreach Open Forum February 13, 2007 2:42 PM 2B48 Kroch Agenda: Digital Reference Services--Virginia Cole Refshare--Virginia Cole Reference Sampling Week--Jill Powell Minutes: Digital Reference Services Committee update: On behalf of the Digital Reference Services Committee, Virginia led a discussion of the PSEC Digital Reference Services Committee which currently focuses on chat reference, managing the campus-wide service, and exploring new technologies to support reference. For the past year they have been exploring participating in a national cooperative chat service that would extend our hours of basic reference to Cornellians to 24/7. We currently use OCLC Question-Point software for chat. Through a collaboration of staff at Mann, Engineering, and Olin-Uris, the current hours of chat reference at Cornell are M-F 10-am-5pm and M-Th 7-10pm. We are not able to staff early mornings, many evening hours, later evening hours, or weekends. The committee wants to extend those hours of service. That's where the chat coop comes in. The committee did a trial of the 24/7 academic chat cooperative chat via OCLC Question-Point. The trial meant librarians here participated by staffing the service during designated shifts. Cooperatives come in many forms--24/7 nationwide academic, 24/7 nationwide public library, state cooperatives (all librarians--academic, public, special in a state), regional cooperatives, partnerships. Virginia demoed a few features of the OCLC cooperative chat service. Participants take shifts. During the shift, they monitor an online chat queue and pick up patrons. If a librarian from the patron's institution is monitoring, the software marks the patron with an asterisk so that the patron's home librarian can pick them up and give them the best service. Each institution in the coop creates a "cheat sheet" with info like url for catalog, directions to libraries, where to find research guides, etc as well as pre-formatted responses, scripts, and urls-these help cooperative chatters provide reference help to users from other institutions. The software automatically matches a patron with the appropriate cheat sheet, scripts, and urls. Quailty of the service is monitored by OCLC. Contractual guidelines and behaviors, features of the QuestionPoint software, and paid Quality Control personnel contribute to high quality chat reference service. If we participated in the coop, Cornell Library staff would continue providing our local Cornell service (M-F 10am-5pm). A handful of volunteers, Digital Reference Services Committee members, would contribute the required hours to the cooperative. The coop involves additional funding and a contribution of hours--these are still being negotiated. The request for participation in the coop and funding was submitted to PSEC. Refshare On behalf of the Citation Management Committee, Virginia demonstrated RefShare, a Refworks program that allows users to dynamically share their RefWorks folders with others on the web. RefShare allows RefWorks users to easily make available to others their personal folders and bibliographies as searchable databases. In other words to publish databases to the web with a few easy clicks. Features of Refshare include the ability to share citations, bibliographies, and folders, RSS feeds, searching, export to RefWorks and EndNote, and adding comments. The attachment feature has been turned off, due to concerns about copyright. RefShare is thus a social networking tool. One question was how people would discover a RefShare database. RefShare databases can be shared with urls which can be added to any page, emailed, etc.. Google can be used to discover RefShare databases. Some current examples of Cornellians using RefShare--the Latino Studies program is using it to publish their department library catalog; a group of international linguists will use it to publish a glossary as a database, and the Ornithology is using it to posting new acquisitions. Comments and feedback are welcomed to CITEMANAGE-L@CORNELL.EDU. The Citation Management group is currently exploring funding possibilities for RefShare (it is not free). Sampling Week with Questions Jill reminded the group that for the next week (Feb. 19), reference stats should include the questions asked. This information is mainly for each unit's purposes, so questions of the degree of specificity are left to each unit. Questions should be added to question content field (it's searchable). Jill then showed how to export stats to Excel. Instructions are also available on Reference and Outreach page http://publicservices.library.cornell.edu/psa/ReferenceAndOutreach/faq.cfm. Sorting in Excel was also demoed, and directions have been updated Feb 14, 2007 thanks to Susan Kendrick's input. | ||
