Measuring Quality in Chat Reference Consortia: A Comparative Analysis of Responses to Users' Queries

Burning the Midnight Oil: Librarians, Students, and Late-Night Chat Reference at the University of Notre Dame

“…These include staffing, technology, communication, quality of service, justification of cost and staffing for low-trafficked operations, and hours of service. These authors identified an additional issue in chat consortia (what some have used as a solution to the hours question)-non-local librarians, because of lack of first-hand knowledge about other institutions' collections, services, and policies, would not provide as good a service as local librarians would, and, conversely, that librarians staffing on behalf of other institutions could not be expected to be as familiar with their non-local collections, services, and policies (Meert and Given, 2009). …”

Collaboration and synergy in hybrid Q&A: Participatory design method and results

“…Accuracy of ready-reference questions was found to be high in a longitudinal analysis of live chat transcripts, and recommendations for increasing correct answers were provided by Radford, Connaway, Confer, Sabolsci-Boros, and Kwon (2011). Meert and Given (2009) have also examined quality in chat reference consortia. Maximiek, Rushton, and Brown (2010) analyzed instant messaging transcripts to evaluate service quality.…”

A Systematic Review of Research on Live Chat Service

“…Across the data set, the highest percentage of questions reported not answered in real time (a measure of incompleteness) came from questions that were handled by chat operators within a consortium, but not from the local library staff, thus it might be expected that being less familiar with the specific patrons would result in a greater degree of questions not fully answered. 44 The other outcome path studied in the data set was the percentage of questions that were referred by the chat operator, either to another librarian on staff, or to a users' home library institution. Table 8 summarizes the percentage of questions that were recorded as referred to another librarian or another service.…”