Life as a Live Reference Librarian

How It Works

I thought it might be helpful to give a brief overview of how a typical live reference transaction goes, for those of you who are unfamiliar with it.

Step one: the patron types and submits a question

Step two: the question is 'picked up' by one of the reference librarians

Step three: the reference interview begins via real-time chat with the patron, just like in a traditional reference setting. The librarian makes sure he/she understands exactly what it is the patron is looking for

Step four: the librarian can walk the patron through various Internet searches, 'co-browse' (the patron's browser will be lead wherever the librarian's browser takes it), and search proprietary databases together, depending on the patron's information needs

Step five: if a satisfactory answer cannot be found within a reasonable amount of time, the librarian will refer the question to a particular library, specialist, or second level reference service depending on the information need

To ask a reference question yourself and experience the service first-hand, visit http://www.247ref.org/ and click on the owl.

The Type/Range of Questions and Patrons

As this is simply an informal discussion I have no statistics or data to 'back up' the following observations. These comments are based solely on my own experience as a virtual reference librarian.

I've personally received questions from the Netherlands and Italy, and it goes without saying that we get them from all over the United States, and particularly California. As touched on in the first part of this article series, this is really one of my favourite things about this job: you never know what you'll get, day in and day out. True, the traditional reference desk can be like this too, for you never know what someone may ask, but in my experience the questions we receive virtually seem to be more varied, complex, and challenging.

While we do get a fair number of routine "how can I renew this book online" and "where is my nearest branch" type questions, the majority that I've received tend to be true reference questions. I think one of the reasons the questions do tend to be more challenging than questions I got when I was doing traditional reference work is the sheer vastness of our clientelle. We get business executives, students ranging from high school through university, doctors, teachers, librarians from all over who use us as a back-up reference source, or who are demonstrating the service to colleagues. Similarly, with the geographic vastness of our clientelle, serving a world-wide patron base, we tend to get many more non-local questions than typically received in a traditional reference environment.

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