We'll Take It from Here: Further Developments We'd Like To See in Virtual Reference Software.

Virtual reference services--providing patrons with live, real-time reference over the Web--have suddenly become a very popular topic in the library community. Any conference program with "virtual reference" or "digital reference" or "24/7" or any of the variety of other euphemisms we use for live, online reference on the Web, is guaranteed to be packed. New electronic discussion lists and discussion groups are popping up like mushrooms. The first articles on the subject have already appeared in American Libraries and Library Journal, and dozens more are being churned out as we speak. But even more telling are the numbers of libraries that have actually begun to implement it. In September 1999, there were no more than five libraries that had implemented any kind of live virtual reference service, or that even knew what it was. Today, less than eighteen months later, there are over two hundred libraries from all over the world that have started offering live online reference in one guise or another, and more are joining the fray everyday. Of the more than two hundred libraries worldwide that have started offering live online reference services, only a few have tried to develop their own versions of virtual reference software--often based on an existing chat application of some sort. Most have chosen to go with one of the many commercially available applications like eGain Live, Cisco's Webline, LivePerson, Humanclick, or a number of others--all of which were originally designed to allow e-commerce companies to provide live interactive customer service over the Web. And all of us have been struggling--with varying degrees of success--to take these commercial customer service applications and modify them for library reference purposes. As the Product Development Manager for LSSI's Virtual Reference software, I am a veteran of those struggles, and have the scars to prove it. Over the past two years now, I have worked to adapt a number of commercial e-commerce applications for reference purposes, and it has not always been an easy process. On the surface, answering a customer's questions about a pair of denim jeans and answering a patron's question about the etymology of the word denim (or anything else) would seem to have much in common. In reality, however, there are some pretty fundamental differences between online customer service and online reference and the software that is necessary to support it. In the first place, customer inquires about denim jeans or any other product can almost always be answered with information from the company Web site alone. So as long as the software works well with the company Web site, there is no problem, at least for the e-commerce people. But that is hardly the case in reference. To answer the question about the etymology of denim (it comes from de Nimes or "from Nimes," France, by the way, for those who were dying to know), a librarian might want to check at least one or two good etymological dictionaries and perhaps a few other resources, none of which are actually part of the library's own Web site. And the next reference question is likely to require browsing a whole different set of resources. So the software that needs only work well with the company's site when used in e-commerce applications must be compatible with thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, of other resources when it is used for reference. And there are plenty of other difficulties too. These software packages lack a good "on-hold" function because it assumes that a customer service rep will be able to quickly answer a question and move on to the next one without significant delay. True enough, when you are answering a question about a pair of jeans but not when you are a librarian browsing all over the Web looking for the answer to a reference question while the patron waits. And while the built-in knowledge bases that come with many of these packages may work quite effectively for answering product questions where there are a limited number of facts about a limited number of items, they have not performed well in library reference work where there can be almost infinite numbers of questions and answers. …