Comments on: Is virtual reference successful? Part III (Hint: yes it is)

By: Pascal Lupien

Pascal Lupien — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 14:29:00 +0000

I would like to repeat that I appreciate Peter Bromberg’s comments. I looked back at my first response and realized that it may also come across as rather “snarky”, which was not intended. His parts II and III are well written and thoughtful and allowed me to develop a much better understanding of the important points he was trying to make. In any case, it is clear that we are all on the same side when it comes to VR, although we may approach things differently.

By: caleb

caleb — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 18:38:00 +0000

A lot of people are saying blithely, "why don't you just use IM?", as if they can't imagine a situation where IM wouldn't work. What gives?

I don't really see "IM" and "VR" as different animals. It's all about online communication, and for some of us, demand for our services are growing like crazy. For the others, it takes a lot more than software to make a new service a success, and it takes years.

People have summarized this before, I know, but it's a moving target.

Using IM as a tool for chat service has strengths:

* low training and technical support threshold
* existing structure of commercial networks
* personalized
* people are familiar with the tools and networks are "open" in the sense that you can talk to whoever you want, not just librarians
* presence notifications (so and so logged in/out/is away right now)

Using library-vendor VR products as tools also has strengths:

* resource-sharing
* existing structures of collaboration, 24/7 service and or e-mail follow-up
* statistical machinations

IM has weaknesses

* terrible patron privacy
* not always allowed on school and library networks
* non-IM users get no service (Yes I know about meebome)

VR tools have weaknesses too

* a web browser is not usually considered a tool for synchronous communication
* See Pascal Lupien for a discussion of some apparant technical problems

And each individual commercial IM or library VR tool also has it's strengths and weaknesses.

Will there soon be a tool that combines the best of each kind of tool and scraps the worst of them? Yes.

Until then, libraries with different needs will make different choices regarding the right chat tool.

By: K.G. Schneider

K.G. Schneider — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 17:48:00 +0000

Thanks for Part III. I agree, your tone in this is nicer, and I like that. It's far more persuasive.

Having said that, I'm personally not convinced by your arguments. I'd need to believe that collaboration adn 24/7 presence were worth the trade-off in software that is one more tool for people to use and an expensive tool for libraries to buy.

When I make an appointment with Comcast for new services, they point me to their own chat client. Dell does the same. But that's because I'm already there. You're hoping to bring people to the library website and then convince them to use the VR client, instead of taking a popular technology (IM) and infiltrating known spaces for people with that. Knowing what I know about lirbaries, I think that's backwards.

Also, I have had too many experiences with buggy library VR clients not to agree with the point about their technical unreliability.

Still, a good series.