Category: Electronic Reference

Learning Circuits has a fairly extensive review of Microsoft Live Meeting, which appears to be another possible virtual reference solution.  Seemed to be a somewhat mixed review, and as usual, library use of this product looks like it’d take a little tweaking to squeeze it into our exact purpose, but if you’re a Microsoft shop…

I’ve really got to weed some of my feeds.  I find that if I run in to an interesting post that goes on for more than a paragraph I let it sit until I have time to digest it, and sadly I find it hard to make the time.  As such, this great post by…

Registration for Virtual Reference Desk 2005 (November 14-15) is now open Link: VRD 2005: Home.

Haven’t had a chance to play with this, nor would it likely matter as I don’t have a webcam, but there’s a beta release of something called vSkype out that allows one to conference "up to 200" people in a conference call (with or w/o video).  There’s a screenshot of it in action here.

I have a suspicion that I missed the boat on this one and the announcement has already been widely, um, announced, but this was the first I’d heard of it, and it seems a valid tool for distance students (though of course you should be the primary provider of reference services for your own students). …

Last month I wrote about a neat-looking virtual reference tool called Convoq ASAP, which had a really nice feature in that the one-to-one version was free. (Web Meetings for Nothing, Collaborate for Free).  A couple of days ago a colleage asked me about the free version, and when I went to the Convoq website to…

Arnold, Julie "Evaluating the Quality of a Chat Service" portal: Libraries and the Academy – Volume 5, Number 2, April 2005, pp. 177-193 Interesting article with some results that oppose earlier studies.  The authors examined 351 virtual reference transactions over an 8-month period and found that correct answers occurred nearly 92% of the time, which…