IM/chat reference

IMing is something that I was quite familiar with in college; I think most of us at that time would IM someone over calling them. For personal use it is great, because you can talk to a couple of people at one time.

I think (in my Library) IM/chat reference would be a little hard to implement. First, our reference desk gets really busy, so it would be hard to manage face-to-face questions, email questions, telephone questions, and IM/chat questions at once. I like the idea of having a person who is not on the reference desk monitoring this feature, but our staff is so small that if you are not on the desk you are probably trying to get everything else done. Email questions are nice because you have time to think about the best response, but you don’t always get an immediate response or any response at all from the patron. The nice thing about chat is that you get instantaneous feedback from the patron, so you know if something is working or not.

Overall I think IM/chat reference is a great feature to offer to one’s patrons, and maybe someday my Library will look into implementing it.

Thank you for reading!