Week 6 :Chat

I chatted with two co-workers for this activity, and one of them is participating in 23 Things. I am not one of the librarians who serves as a volunteer for LRC Live, so I'd be interested in hearing about their experiences. The article on e-reference from Library Journal discussed some of it's challenges, one of them being the demands by some users for "quick (almost instantaneous) answers." If I were providing e-reference, I think I would feel pressure to find the needed information as quickly as possible, and it would take me some time to become comfortable providing reference services online. It would also take a while to learn how to deal with patrons like the one described in the article Virtual in Vegas, where the patron "chatted" with the librarian very little, remaining mostly silent for the 20 minutes of their session.

A number of years ago our library made the decision to ban chatting. We had a situation where patrons were sitting at our stations and chatting for hours on end. This created problems for students who needed to access stations to do research or access Blackboard.

Under "Best Practices for IM," the Library Journal article lists loading IM software on public PCs. "Let users in the library get help without having to go to the reference desk." We always stress to our students that we are here to help them, and emphasize that they should come to the desk if they need assistance. It doesn't make sense to me to go online for assistance if you have a librarian a few yards away who can help you, so I don't agree with this "best practice."

One of the other comments I noted in the LJ article was the statement that with IM, "we are able to talk about things that we would hesitate to say in an email. Office politics and more "feeling types of things are best said without the thought of an everlasting email trail." However, my understanding of chat on G-Mail is that your chat sessions are saved unless you choose to delete them or turn off the save function.

I enjoyed looking at the techdictionary of text message abbreviations. I tested some friends to ask if they knew what certain abbreviations stood for, and got some interesting wrong answers! Well, at this point it's time to say BFN. G2G.