ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 63 | June 2003
AskNow!: Update on the Australian Collaborative Chat Reference Service
Fast fingers, technological savvy and Web familiarity are some of the skills required to successfully operate in a chat reference service environment. AskNow! is a national service collaboratively provided by the National Library of Australia, the State Libraries of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland and Western Australia, and the Northern Territory and Australian Capital Territory library services. Available Monday to Friday, from 9 am to 7 pm AEST, the service enables a customer, regardless of location, to connect directly to a librarian and receive a response to a question in ‘real time’. A special feature of the software, co-browsing, allows a librarian to ‘push’ a webpage to a patron so that both can simultaneously view the same document.
An initiative of the Council of Australian State Libraries (CASL), AskNow! is a 12-month pilot to test the potential for collaboration, and to assess and evaluate the demand, for this type of service—in addition to exploring issues of staffing and sustainability. AskNow! uses 24/7 reference software provided by the Metropolitan Cooperative Library System (MCLS) in the United States, hosted on their server. In the beginning, two ‘seats’ were licensed, allowing for two librarians to operate the service concurrently.
AskNow! went live on 26 August 2002, with no marketing or promotion, and received
45 inquiries. Usage for the next four months was constant, at around 30–40 inquiries
per day and around 700 per month. This allowed the service to be bedded down,
and for staff to become familiar with a totally new way of delivering reference.
User demographics and satisfaction with the service is assessed through an exit
survey. The most popular age group in these early months was those aged between
35 and 49. It was pleasing to note that 41 per cent of users were living in
regional areas.
The official launch and related media publicity on 20 January this year marked a new stage in the pilot. (Never underestimate the impact of publicity!) Usage jumped immediately, with 568 inquiries received the next day. A third ‘seat’, providing for three concurrent online librarians, was quickly activated to handle the increased demand.
The average number of inquiries received per month since January is 3300, or about 160 per day. Since the service began, up until the end of April this year, 16 000 inquiries have been received. The questions have been many and varied. Most have been answered during the chat session, while more complex questions have been forwarded to the email reference services offered by all participating libraries. In answering questions, librarians obviously need to rely on information readily accessible online—including library catalogues, Kinetica, journal indexes, databases and encyclopedias, in addition to search engines and other websites. When using information from licensed resources, AskNow! operators are mindful to abide by the conditions of license agreements.
The service is used by a wide variety of clientele—students, journalists, academics, librarians, genealogists and the general public. Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. It is obvious that patrons value the interactive nature of the service and the immediacy of the information. 94.5 per cent of survey respondents stated that they would use the service again, 85.4 per cent rated the quality of the information provided as ‘good’ to ‘excellent’, and 91.8 per cent rated ease of use as being ‘very good’ to ‘excellent’.
In a new development, the National Library of New Zealand and the National Library Board of Singapore recently joined the AskNow! consortium, giving an opportunity to explore the potential for collaboration beyond Australian shores.
The pilot period is not yet over, but AskNow! has been a successful exercise
in collaboration. It has enabled a chat reference service to be offered for
50 hours per week (55 hours during daylight saving)—a situation which no library
could have provided alone. It has also enabled librarians from all states and
territories to learn more about each other’s collections, facilities and services.
At the completion of the 12-month pilot it is hoped that the service will be
established as an ongoing collaborative service. It is clear from the feedback
that AskNow! has filled a niche, and complements the existing suite of offsite
reference services already on offer to patrons in an increasingly online world.
—Fran Wilson
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