Sara Weissman maintains that experimentation -- with parameters -- is essential to a library
By Sara Weissman April 15, 2001What if you build it--and they don't come? We opened our homework chat room on January 16; we closed it on February 9. After 70 staff hours over 21 days (including some volunteer hours), we had... one question. One out of 71,000 public school children in Morris County asked about something on her physics test the next day. It was the $1400 question: the salary cost of the librarians who waited to be helpful, for a month. But we learned a lot.
Lesson #1
Burnout is nothing compared to boredom.
Reference librarians want to be engaged, busy. If you're starting a pilot for real-time reference, be sure you have useful, effective things for your staff to do while they wait: multitask at their workstations, do book selection, and handle phone queries. By day 14, waiting out the two hours the chat room was open was mind-numbing. By week four none of us really even wanted to open it at 3 p.m., knowing we'd be chained to it for the next two hours.
Lesson #2:
It's more important for you to learn about your audience than it is for them to learn about you.
We had three articles published in large-circulation newspapers, distributed flyers in all our departments, mailed to the 147 schools in our service area, faxed the three charter schools, and put the flyer for the service online as a printable master for distribution. We contacted the state and county Educational Media Association (EMA) several times, saying we were available to work with students or to show school librarians around chat if they didn't know the environment. The EMA in turn distributed our notices to their electronic discussion list. Despite a state curricular mandate to teach information literacy, not one school librarian stopped by for over a month. Our director, who had been asked to judge a middle school spelling bee, went with a stack of fliers in hand. We announced the service in county and municipal online bulletin boards. One mother stuck her head in one afternoon to find out what chat was. Neither she nor her children returned. 'Marketing plans,' the buzz in library outreach these days, tend to have as their central point that the public doesn't know what we can do and offer. But perhaps we have it backwards. Decrying poor public relations may just be a gloss over our lack of understanding of our users and how they are getting information these days.
Lesson #3:
We hadn't thought about measuring this kind of service.
We only backed into quantifying as it became apparent chat was eating up staff time to no particular purpose. We wondered how to compare chat volume with our reference desk traffic. We approximated the level at which we would be serving the student population in chat (71,000), at the same rate as the general population (440,000) by phone and in-person. The students comprise 16 percent of our population, and our population asks 114 questions per thousand (population served) per year. Only one in eight residents asks a single question per year.
We learned that we would have to draw 1,295 questions a year in chat to equal in-building service or 2.5 questions per hour, for the 510 hours Homework Chat would be open in a year. It didn't happen. Before we threw staff, time, and money at this, we needed to know what the cost-effectiveness of the operation was, what we might give up to do it, and at what point would we have to fold our cards and walk away.
Lesson #4:
Work from what they use, not from what you think they might want or should have.
We closed chat, and we redesigned our front page with a very blunt 'From home: research, reserve, renew!' which links to a consolidated page of every remote service we offer. For patrons, remote access to EBSCO is a much bigger deal here than remote access to librarians, by mail or chat, so we'll springboard off that need. Chat reference may be an idea whose time has not yet come. Telephone reference, when it began in the 1930s, was practically a hidden service because of fear it would mushroom and swamp reference departments. But even vigorously trumpeted from the rooftops in Morris County, NJ, chat cannot muster a question a day from 71,000 students in 149 schools. So we'll put our brains, time, and money where the patrons are and perhaps try again in the next school year.
Knute Seebohm, director of the Morris County Library, has an extraordinarily high level of faith in his staff. When we said, 'We'd like to try a homework chat thing for a month,' he replied, as he had when the library web site and then e-ref were floated, 'Sounds great...go ahead. A month? No, give it three, if you want.' A staff, given the freedom to try, to fail, and to try again, will grow and stretch, which in these fluid times is a good management philosophy. Ask him about it: seebohm@main.morris.org.
| Author Information |
| Sara Weissman comanages electronic reference at Morris County Library, Whippany, NJ |
