University Times

Pittsburgh campus faculty, staff and students soon will be able to chat on-line with a University Library System (ULS) librarian on weekday afternoons — in a real-time session, from the comfort of their offices, homes or dorms — thanks to a new ULS reference service.

“Ask-a-Librarian Live” employs technology that combines Internet chat with the ability to instantly send web sites and other information directly to a library user’s computer.

Through chat sessions, users can ask for help in much the same way that they would at a library’s reference desk. The librarian on duty at Ask-a-Librarian Live may point the user directly to an answer or recommend appropriate reference sources.

Questions can be as simple as “How do I renew a book on-line?” (The librarian will guide you through the process.) For more difficult queries, the librarian might lead a user through comparatively complex procedures such as tapping into one of ULS’s approximately 500 databases. Depending on a user’s research needs, the librarian staffing Ask-a-Librarian Live may connect the user with another librarian at one of ULS’s 14 departmental libraries.

“This is a great opportunity to have an expert show you how to navigate the web and find information that is credible, reliable and up to date,” said Elizabeth Mahoney, ULS coordinator of digital reference services and head of the School of Information Sciences library.

It beats doing hit-or-miss research via a mainstream search engine such as Google, where it can be hard to differentiate between accurate and bogus information, she noted.

And Ask-a-Librarian Live is free, unlike many other “expert” sites on the World Wide Web.

“With this new service, we’re getting further away from the idea of ‘remote’ users,” said Mahoney. “There’s no such thing as a remote user, just a remote library.”

Mahoney predicted that Ask-a-Librarian Live will appeal not just to users who prefer to do computer-based research away from a library, but also to those who are shy about seeking help at a reference desk. “When students, and even some faculty and staff, approach a librarian for help, the first words out of their mouths tend to be, ‘I’m sorry to bother you….’ As if it wasn’t our job to help them!” Mahoney exclaimed, with a laugh.

Ask-a-Librarian Live originally was scheduled to begin this week but was delayed due to ULS server problems related to the Sobig e-mail virus and a virulent Internet worm. The new service now is expected to be up and running next week. During its introductory year, Ask-a-Librarian Live will be available Monday through Friday from noon to 5 p.m. Those hours probably will be extended if the service proves to be popular.

When ULS began planning a year ago to launch Ask-a-Librarian Live, few librarians expected that the service would be offered on weekday afternoons, according to Mahoney. “We had this image that we’d be offering this late at night or on weekends. Some people thought, ‘I’m going to be able to work from home. I’ll be doing this in my bunny slippers from my living room couch.’”

But ULS’s tracking of its users’ web-based research activity found that traffic peaked in mid-week, with Saturday being the least active day for on-line research at ULS.

To connect to the new service, select the Ask-a-Librarian Live button on the ULS home page (www.library.pitt.edu). The service is available only to users who type in their Pitt computing account passwords and e-mail addresses. When the service is not available, either because it’s off-hours or the librarian on duty is swamped with requests, there is an automatic default to the e-mail version of Ask-a-Librarian.

Hillman and other ULS libraries also will continue to staff reference desks and answer telephone questions, for users who prefer direct human contact.

Feedback from library users, together with the popularity of ULS’s e-mail Ask-a-Librarian service, introduced in 1999, prompted the system to add a real-time chat version, said Rush G. Miller, Hillman University Librarian and director of ULS.

“We did a major set of focus groups with undergraduates and graduate students and faculty, and one thing we found was that they really value librarians’ expertise and the person-to-person contact that they get in the library,” Miller said. “But we also found that the first place many people look for information is on-line, where until now they haven’t enjoyed real-time access to our librarians’ expertise and help in navigating” through reference sources.

“When people are working remotely in the residence hall or apartment or wherever, using library resources like the on-line catalogue or databases or e-journals, they may encounter problems, and it’s hard for them to get help at that point. Ask-a-Librarian Live is an attempt to provide on-line help interactively at that moment, so users can resolve a problem and move on with their research,” Miller said.

One of the service’s best features, he said, is that it enables a librarian to call up a web page, database or other on-line source and transmit it to a user’s computer screen, so he or she can follow along as the librarian navigates. “It requires a rather sophisticated piece of software to accomplish this, although it wasn’t very expensive — a few thousand dollars for us to license it,” said Miller.

He cautioned that it’s unclear how valuable Ask-a-Librarian Live will prove to be. “It’s not a heavily used service in most libraries that have tried it,” he pointed out. “It’s a technology that is still evolving. I think we’ll have better systems two or three years from now to accomplish this kind of outreach service.”

Locally, Carnegie Mellon University’s library and The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh offer interactive on-line reference services. According to a survey last December, 87 percent of the members of the Association of Research Libraries, to which Pitt and Carnegie Mellon belong, offer some kind of chat reference service.

Miller said Ask-a-Librarian Live is just one of ULS’s new outreach services this fall. Others include making wireless laptop computers available for check-out at Hillman Library and another program, in collaboration with Student Affairs, to station librarians in residence halls to assist students with on-line research at crunch times during the term, such as the weeks just before mid-term and final exams.

— Bruce Steele