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Emerging Library Technologies III: Virtual Reference Perspectives, Part 1
Emerging Library Technologies: Virtual Reference Perspectives, Parts 1 & 2
Part 1 - Wednesday, January 1110:30 a.m. - 11:20 a.m. The AskAway consortium, in Wisconsin, started almost 10 years ago with a "hey kids let's put on a show" attitude. Daily experiences soon showed that virtual reference is both fun and a lot of work. The consortium has grown and changed drastically several times over the decade from a small group of libraries with no money to a fully funded state wide consortium and is now a group faced with massive funding cuts once again re-imagining the service. This session will share some of those best practices that were learned the hard way along with why we believe virtual reference matters.
More and more libraries are embracing mobile technologies in service delivery. Funded by IMLS, a research project was conducted to examine the best practices of text reference service. In this class, findings from this project will be shared, covering the following topics: text reference delivery models, information needs fulfilled by text reference, and competencies requisite for providing text reference service. Part 2 - Wednesday, January 1810:30 a.m. – 11:20 a.m. Virtual worlds are an expanding online social frontier, but where does library service fit into that? We've successfully brought reference services to email, chat, and even SMS text, despite the challenges presented by each. This session will discuss experiences with the challenges (and rewards) of merging library reference services into online virtual worlds. We'll also be talking about how the Community Virtual Library on Second Life was created and how it has been managed over the last five years of its existence.
Samantha Thompson comes from a diverse professional background, since her graduation from Southern Connecticut State University she has worked as a librarian at Penn State, Collier County Public Library, and most recently as the manager for AskNYPL at the New York Public Library. In addition to this work she has been an adjunct lecturer at the University of Illinois and been the head of reference for the Community Virtual Library. This last position has given her five years of experience in providing reference service inside a virtual world and has been included in the book "This Book is Overdue" as well as in a series of columns for the journal Reference Librarian.
Mary-Carol Lindbloom, South Central Regional Library Council Nancy Skipper, Cornell University Jaclyn McKewan, Western NY Library Resources Council |
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Mark Beatty is Training and Automation Coordinator for Wisconsin Library Services (WiLS), and trainer and consortial wrangler for interlibrary loan, eBooks, websites and virtual reference. His background includes conducting hundreds of internet training workshops, dozens of eBooks workshops and demonstrations, as well as in depth workshops on Interlibrary Loan and Reference services. Beatty is currently the lead for the AskAway virtual reference multi-type consortium in Wisconsin and a recent past-President of LITA, the Library and Information Technology Association division of ALA.
Joseph Janes, PhD, University of Washington
Lili Luo is an Assistant Professor at the School of Library and Information Science at San Jose State University. Her primary area of research interests is digital reference and she has been publishing actively in this area. Her other research interests include library education, information seeking behavior, and human-information interaction. 
Samantha Thompson, aka Hypatia Dejavu