Marie Radford’s FLA Presentation

Marie Radford presented Thursday afternoon at FLA and it was a great presentation. As it happened a last years ALA, I took frantic notes on her research in Virtual Reference.  A fact that really stuck out to me – the average face to face reference transaction takes the same time as the average chat session (12- 13 minutes). The other fact that struck me- users don’t want video reference, they like the anonymous aspect of chat and the transcript that produced.  As we look at software, this was an interesting fact and consider. 

Through her research she has developed 3 ways to boost accuracy in a virtual reference transaction. Improve your accuracy from around 72 to 93% accuracy with three easy steps during any transaction.

1. For Ready Reference queries, answer the specific question asked. It seems simple right! Be we can all be guilty – the desk is busy and someone asks, “How tall is the Great Wall of China?” We quickly find a general site on the Great Wall and push the URL and move on to the next customer. Accuracy is boosted a lot if we take a moment and confirm the exact information is on the page- and tell the user where it is on the page! It’s not helpful if they can’t find it.  Remembering to ask, “Did this answer your question?” and waiting for the answer will help here as well.

2. Clarify all questions! Don’t forget the reference interview. A perfect example – a question I once had. The user asked for books the “history of Africa” so I jump right into a search and send a few titles- well, the user actually was studying the history of evolution – and was not expressing this in the opening question to me. We got the info – but I would of saved a lot of work by taking a moment to talk about what exactly she was looking for.

3. Always check web links pushed to users. Marie reported some links sent were broken – this means even our bookmarks. Any site can be down on any given day. Asking, “Can you see this page” as you cobrowse will also help.

Anyway to see her research, it is best to go directly to the source.  Check out both her handouts (radford-fla-handouts) and PowerPoint presentation (fla-radford-ppt).  Follow her blog at:  http://librarygarden.blogspot.com/ and follow her research study at: http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/synchronicity/