Ask-a-Librarian Services Need a Reboot

I hadn’t thought much about these statements of limitations, but after reading your post, I agree. We need to make sure we provide outstanding customer service online as well as in person.

I think I may agree with the general idea that online service should be better, but your line of reasoning is less than pragmatic.

The reality for many libraries is that they are not open everyday at all hours. If you give a question on a saturday after 5pm (when many libraries close) in the summer (when they are closed Sundays and possibly Mondays), the best a library can offer is 48 hour service schedule. This is not discrimination in any way — just the practical reality of the service. An increase in the service commitment will require an increase in resources, plain and simple.

I also think that until online “aska” services are pervasive and overwhelming (and they are not according to any statistic that I have seen), libraries should focus on the in-person client first. A good 90% of the so-called “online clients” are actually in-person clients who go to the library website to find out such things as library hours, place a hold, book a computer and so on. Most “online customers” are online in order to make their in-person experience more convenient. Thus, resources need to be put into keeping the library circulation line-ups as short as they can be.

Finally, despite those elongated promises, the reality is that most online reference questions are answered much more quickly than the 48 hour promise and most “online customers” understand this service commitment. Heck, I had a question for a domain name purchasing company and it took them a good 2 weeks to get back to me — and you know what? I was fine with that. Why? Because they had a note telling me that it might take them that long to answer.

Ryan – interesting points. Here are my additions:

“The reality for many libraries is that they are not open everyday at all hours” – right. I’m not expecting 24/7 service. Just normal service during working hours – there should be no difference between in-person and email/chat/IM/phone.

“libraries should focus on the in-person client first…” Not sure I agree (or even understand) your “until they are pervasive and overwhelming” point. Simply stated – why? When I was a ref librarian, we took the next question – be that in-person, on the phone, or email. And that was in the 90′s. A question is a question, and a customer is a customer.

“A good 90% of the so-called “online clients” are actually in-person clients…” Ours aren’t. I doubt your statistic holds true with other libraries, either (though I certainly can’t prove it).

Stephen – good thoughts! A couple of points:

“Not every library is blessed like your own with a digital branch staff.” True… but my DB staff build the site – they don’t answer questions. That’s the public services librarians jobs, and anyone who writes a blog post (anyone staff member can do that).

“Whatever local decisions are made, they have to be made to best serve the local community first since it pays the bills.” Exactly my point. I would hazard a guess that by limiting or prioritizing service the way most libraries are doing (see my post), they are NOT “best serving the local community.” Instead of truly serving their local community, they are ONLY serving the ones that actually walk into the building – and that’s a small, small percentage of the total local community.

Want to truly serve the local community? Get out of the building, introduce local businesses and organizations to the ask a librarian service, “the best-kept-secret that actually needs to be promoted to the population at large” as you rightly say – and see what happens.

At the college I work for we have a chat based Ask-a-librarian, so you get help the minute you ask your question.

I have no problem with asynchronous service taking more time–the library isn’t always open–but don’t agree that walk-in customers should have priority. I think the only reason libraries prioritize in this way is because we are uncomfortable making a person wait when we are facing them live. It’s easier to ignore an online patron. But I can’t see how the question online is any less urgent. We’ve done the same thing with telephone reference for years. Busy at the reference desk? Let the phone ring! I realize, of course, that many libraries don’t have a lot of resources, but the reference desks I’ve seen lately are not especially busy. I think we have the time and resources to do better.

While I’m an advocate of good customer service no matter how, when, or where you provide the service, I can’t agree entirely with your points.

Unfortunately many libraries jumped on the virtual reference bandwagon without forethought and appropriate planning for how they would staff the service, what hours they would provide the service, the best system for the service, etc. What has resulted because of our professions overwhelming urge to try the latest buzz are libraries who have set up something that where they can’t provide a high level of service.

As to defining parameters for the service, I don’t see this as a bad thing. Unless you have a staff member dedicated to monitoring virtual reference at a location away from a public service desk, in-person patrons should absolutely take precedence over a virtual patron. Common sense dictates that you pay attention to the person who is physically in the same space as you. Not that the virtual patron’s question is any less important, but you do need to set some guidelines of who to help first.

As to defining what types of questions are appropriate (ones that can be answered with short, factual answers) is again something that needs to be up to the individual library. Virtual reference has some inherent issues that can make it difficult to conduct an effective reference interview. Yes, it can be done, but it can often be time-consuming. As libraries become short on money, we also are becoming short on staff, hence short on the amount of time we can devote to the various balls we try to keep in the air.

While it’s nice to say “We’ll get back to you as soon as possible”, some patrons want a definitive time frame. Some questions are timely and if they can’t wait 48 hours, perhaps this will encourage them to pick up the phone during the library’s hours when they are more likely to get a quick response. I’m the only librarian (although I do have paraprofessional staff) at my library and it could well take me 48 hours to get back to someone with a query if I’m out of the library. While I’d imagine most libraries try to get back to patrons quickly, it isn’t always possible.

I have a great deal of respect for you David, but I think you might be a bit out of touch in regards to what those of us in public services deal with on a daily basis. Many librarians are working in short-staffed situations trying to maintain the same level of customer service and number of services that they could with a full staff. It’s simply not possible.

I’m really conflicted about the issue of online ask-a services outside the hours when our reference folks are available. I do agree it looks very bad to give such long turnaround times. I work in a biomedical library in an academic setting and it’s a hot topic for us about whether it’s “better” service to have an email question answered by “one of us” when we’re back at work on Monday vs picked up by someone at another random library in our network at the time it comes in. Snobbery maybe, but also recognizing that if someone went to all the trouble of finding how to contact the AskA service at the medical library (not easy to do from the main library page but that’s another story), they really want to talk to us. And especially in the case of researchers, we like the opportunity to build that relationship. But I agree we’re not making the best use of aska services. What I’d like to see are some more specialized networks that leverage the subject matter and resource expertise among our librarians as opposed to just trying to cover a lot of hours with everyone trying to answer everything. Or failing that, at least better tools for dealing with handoffs of any kind of online question (email, chat, IM, txt) when the person who started an answer decides they need to punt to the person’s “home” library or expert for whatever reason. Using our current tools, that process is a confusing mess.

I have to disagree with Steven Harris on this. Commercial entities prioritize in-person customers over anything else. This is something I have quite a bit of experience with. What makes the commercial entities out there different from libraries is that they separate roles. Online inquiries are handled by one staff. Telephone inquiries are often centralized at one response center. Local brief inquiries as well as walk-ins are handled in the front-line stores.

The source of consternation here is that libraries centralize almost all of this activity at the reference desk. This is a model at least two publicly-traded companies have been fleeing from to the point of even outsourcing their online storefront operations. Even Apple doesn’t run its stores the way ref desks are set up. Outside of fidelity to tradition, having the ref desk as the focus point for all reference activity regardless of medium isn’t doing libraries any favors.

If online reference, telephone reference, and in-person reference can be differentiated in our libraries things could change. Three different modalities of interaction require overlapping but not equal skill sets. Rather than trying to force it all to happen at the desk, have those watching the desk work on cataloging in between patrons if they’re watching tumbleweeds blow by. Physical separation of staff between these separate functions would reduce the consternation over acceptable minimum service levels, I imagine.

We have email reference, but not IM or Chat reference yet – i looked over our “Ask-A-Librarian” page, which has a form to fill out and some instructions on how to phrase questions, etc. “It is designed to answer brief, factual questions or to provide suggestions to help you find the answer. Visit our FAQ for more details about this service.” The FAQ is pretty extensive, and gives a little more information on the way the service works. The reality of the service is that many questions are answered quite quickly, even those that require some research. I think some of the factors that increase the time between the question being asked and the question being answered have to do with the way that questions get routed and queued – a few librarians working their way through a list of incoming questions from a variety of sources, etc. On the desk, it can be an odd customer service quandary to make a person wait while you answer an email that does not require an immediate answer, simply because you received the email first.

My overall thoughts about your article and assertion is that I agree – but I think that many of the issues can be resolved with simple rewording of the message we send to our patrons, possible the inclusion of auto-response emails during closed hours to let people know that we’re working on it, what our hours of operation are, etc. Possibly followed up by an actual response at the earliest possible time either with an answer or to let people know that we’re working on it. I suppose now I’ll have to bring this up in a meeting… Thanks for a great, thoughtful post!

Oh, and I came to this post via your update on Twitter – if you like to keep track of that kind of info (I’m always interested to know how in/effective a given technique is)

While I understand your objection to some of the limitations on chat and email reference services, the one from KCPL requesting that people only ask short, factual questions makes a lot of sense to me. It is impossible – really, impossible – to handle a complex research question as efficiently and thoroughly on chat as in person. The reference interview takes much longer, it’s harder to tell what the patron really needs, and there’s a lot of “hang on while I find this resource… okay now let me walk you through how to find this resource… okay now are you at this resource?… okay do you see the button that says ‘advanced search’?…” Reference interactions that would take 5-10 minutes at the desk take a half an hour or more on chat, and the fact that it takes so long can be visibly frustrating to patrons who hoped for a quick answer before running off to class. It’s not a bad idea for a library to decide, “These are the kinds of questions we can answer effectively in this medium. Let’s not waste our time on the ones we can’t.”

As a librarian at a large research university that serves many many undergradutes I have no choice but to do my best to handle difficult reference questions over chat, but in the end many of these exchanges conclude with a “Here’s the email address of someone who can help you more thoroughly and effectively via email/phone/an in person meeeting.” Sometimes, non-speedy non-digital modes of communication are really the most effective way to deliver services, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a library recognizing that fact in its policies.

Hmmm … in my experience sometimes people have to wait for their answer in person too. For example, not all of our services and special collections are open as many hours as others. We can intake your query (maybe even refine it a bit and clarify, do a bit of pre-searching to identify the specific item needed, etc.) but we don’t give an answer unless this counts as an answer: we’ll pass this along tomorrow morning when that service opens and/or here are the hours when you could come back. If that counts as an answer, everyone with a “we received your question and we’re working on it” auto-reply is doing the same.

Another random datapoint: a new French ask-a service is promising a response in 72 hours by email, or (I think coming soon) a chat service Mon-Fri 1-6pm.

To the issue at large: given a customer and an email in front of me, I’ll answer the customer – because it looks better, because I can answer face-to-face quicker than I can answer by email, and because when one sends an email one expects to wait a little longer.

I think an email turn-around time should be measured in hours rather than days though. Using one hand. Preferably same morning or same afternoon, but say 4 business-hours as a maximum. If the query is too complicated for that then you do what you’d do in a face-to-face situation, ie write back to them and say “This is what I know so far, I can keep looking and get back to you within [timeframe], does that suit you?”

As for whether IM suits some types of questions less than others – maybe, but I think that should be for the customer to decide. I’ve seen transcripts where the librarian hears the question and unilaterally says “You’ll have to come in to talk to someone in person” – my memory may exaggerate a bit but not much, and it’s horridly rude. I think librarians should say “This will take about half an hour by IM or you could come in and it’d only take 5 minutes – which suits you better?”

(Of course I like multitasking so even if it took me 30min to answer an IM question I’d be getting at least 20min worth of other stuff done at the same time too; I guess other librarians might be more inconvenienced. Still. It’s customer service, isn’t it?)

Re giving email addresses – I find it’s more effective to get the student’s email address so that the appropriate librarian can contact them directly. Otherwise the student has already dredged up the courage to contact one librarian and now they’ve got to do it all over again – library anxiety doubled, and often they just don’t bother and muddle through by themselves.

FYI – y’all might be interested in this blog post – from a library director that understands what I was getting at… (thank you, Katherine!).

What really burns are the pages that suggest the Ask a Librarian service is just a service for quick factual info. Joe Janes and many others have said for years and years that “ready reference” in libraries is dead. People go to Google, they don’t need us for that type of info anymore. Are library reference desks, digital or otherwise, really still getting a lot of ready reference questions? Not in my experience. Then why limit your service to only those questions?

People have much more complex questions, and trying to prevent them from submitting them through your website is such a questionable practice. Are they afraid they won’t be able to do a reference interview online? Offer them some optional form elements like why they need the info, what grade/class it’s for, etc. People are very often willing to elaborate, if you explain to them why you need the info. You could even ask them what their deadline is for the info – and be pleasantly surprised by how often people with complex problems expect to wait a few days for in-depth replies. My thanks to you for bringing this topic up, the points you make are ones that too often get overlooked.

I typed a witty response and lost it somehow. In a nutshell, this whole discussion made me rethink my opinion. As a building manager and a reference librarian, I was initially resistant. I think this comes from the fact that many libraries are doing all they can to help patrons who come in the door and call. E-reference adds additional work to staff who are already, sometimes, stretched to the limit. This leads to poor service all around, not to mention low morale. Restructuring would definitely help.

For what it’s worth, our policy about phone reference also requires that questions be of the short, ready-reference sort. More food for thought. I will pass this discussion along to the Asst. Director. Thanks for raising this important issue.

From, a fellow UTK SIS alum

Great post David! I totally see your point. I’m the kind of person that will try to find the answer myself and not ask a question in real life, until I’ve exhausted all other options. Calling any type of customer service gives me an anxiety attack. I seriously once cried on the phone w/ OCLC. So, I might be an extreme example, but I don’t think I’m alone in that I want to do everything online from home.

I do try and urge our reference department to take IM reference more seriously. I shared your post about the Meebo widget in the catalog with them a year ago. Still, we don’t have IM on our catalog or our website. We do have IM on our Myspace and our FB pages, which reference is supposed to log on to. Only two librarians participate, and they rarely log in. It seems they don’t “have the time” to serve this population. Our problem isn’t even our policies, it’s that they don’t want to even try. It’s frustrating when you want to try new things, and your encouraged to try new things by superiors, but its your peers that don’t want to extend themselves.

As my cousin once said, “I’m not just going to drive to the library and hope for the best. I’m going to check online first!”

Ehh.

I have two responses. The first is direct, the second is more oblique and technology tinged. We’re one of the offending libraries and I agree that the wording is wrong-headed at this point. More outdated than any deliberate attempt to create a second class user. Having said that, this is my second response since my forst one got lost when davidleeking.com burped, hiccuped and/or crashed. I have the luxury of writing this because in the middle of an excellent VR session with a bright 11 year old, Questionpoint flat-lined and hasn’t been resuscitated yet. I’ve only had one patron/customer ever do that to me in-person.

We all have some kind of service hierarchy in place, deliberate or not. People here and now trump telephone callers who for the time being trump the e-mailers and VR patrons who in turn keep trumping each other. We posted the “factual” limits and the 48 hour turnaround to buy ourselves wiggle room and to avoid the open-ended questions that used to be (and still are sometimes) the fare of e-mail reference.

We have been staffing to meet what we see as a service obligation in these areas, and part of the reality is changing corporate and institutional culture. Even with that in mind and some of the more progressive librarians around, there’s still a serious disconnect between the in-person inquiry and the virtual one. The missing nuances of body language, tone and inflection can make a 15 minute reference interview at the desk into a 2 day “hurry up and wait” exchange of e-mails or follow-up VR.

I agree with the observation that our language leaves something to be desired, but my jury is still out on the current practical ability to provide all service to all people all the time.

RK

Richard – “when davidleeking.com burped, hiccuped and/or crashed” – well, I DID eat at a Thai place today… Sorry you had commenting troubles!

I think you’re right – “changing corporate and institutional culture” is the biggest hurdle we face – you can even see that in a couple of the responses above.

I think I’m just echoing many of the other comments here, but here’s my two cents. My library gives equal billing to our various contact methods on the main reference page, but on our email form we state we “strive to respond to questions within 1 business day. For immediate assistance during library hours, please visit the reference desk or call us at 978-256-5521 x111.”

We check email regularly during the work day, but in-person patrons definitely come first – if there is a line of three people, I am helping them even before I answer the phone.

I’m totally on board with treating online patrons with as much respect and promptness as a non-online patron. It’s staff shortages that prevent us from checking the inbox constantly – and unfortunately, there is no way I could realistically dedicate someone for chat reference (so happily that is provided for us).

That being said, one thing I do like about email is that those patrons easily take priority outside of library hours. It is not at all uncommon for me to check the reference inbox at night, on weekend or during holidays, and reply to patrons within hours. They are always astounded at that response, and usually say how happy they are that they didn’t have to wait until we were open again (I just need to be careful about raising unsustainable expectations).

Ask-a-Librarian service has to be taken very seriously, the problem arises when we offered this service for the name sake only. It needs to have a joint venture of fellow professionals and not to be treated as part time job.