Outsourcing Digital Reference: The User Perspective

Abstract

With the advent of digital reference, the outsourcing of a portion of public service is now possible, enabling libraries to offer more hours of service at a lower cost with little awareness on the part of users. Since fall 2003, librarians at Southeastern Louisiana University have teamed up with librarians employed by a partner library and/or Tutor.com's Librarians By Request to provide a 24/7 digital reference service. A comparative analysis of digital reference transcripts and user satisfaction surveys indicates that external librarians can provide good digital reference service with a high level of user satisfaction.

7. Text messaging

“…From medicine, studies include the use of texting for patient reminders (e.g., Downer, Meara, Da Costa, and Sethuraman 2006;Leong et al 2006) and for aftercare treatment (e.g., Robinson et al 2006;Weitzel et al 2007). In academia, studies include texting as library support (Herman 2007;Hill, Hill, and Sherman 2007), as a research methodology (Bosnjak et al 2008;Cheung 2008;Steeh, Buskirk, and Callegaro 2007), as a pedagogical tool (Dürscheid 2002a;Naismith 2007), as a recruitment strategy (Maher 2007), and as a means for reducing school truancy (Allison 2004). Research in environmental development has examined how texting assists Bangladeshi villagers to locate clean water sources (Opar 2006).…”

Cost-effective ways of delivering enquiry services: a rapid review

“…Seven studies, all identified from the LISA search results, met the inclusion criteria 5,9–14 . Two of these studies are linked with one being an evidence summary 10 of another 11 .…”

Librarians’ behavioral performance on chat reference service in academic libraries: Perceived importance vs actual practices

“…Studies on user perspective normally focus on users' satisfaction that include differences in satisfaction between complete answers and referrals (Kwon 2006); the factors that contribute to satisfaction/dissatisfaction with chat (Nilsen and Ross 2006;Pomerantz and Luo 2006); satisfaction with outsourced chat service (Hill, Madarash-Hill and Allred 2007); and user satisfaction related to librarians' behaviour based on RUSA guidelines during chat sessions (Kwon and Gregory 2007). Findings from these standpoints indicated that users tend to be more satisfied when they received complete answers and when the librarians performed listening and communicating, demonstrating expertise in searching and offering pointers, and inviting the user back to the service if they had further questions.…”

“…The evaluation of chat references services were conducted in several ways such as through assessment of the service quality (Armann-Keown, Cooke and Matheson 2015;Fuller and Dryden 2015;Radford and Connaway 2012), user satisfaction (Hill, Madarash-Hill and Allred 2007) and also by comparing the perceived importance and actual practices among users or the service providers (Jaarsma et al 2010;Al-Momani 2016) to identify the differences between measures, e.g. what is believed and the actual practices.…”