The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has awarded a National Leadership Grant for a collaborative research project between OCLC Research and the Rutgers University School of Communication and Information (SC&I) to investigate library-based Virtual Reference Services (VRS).
OCLC Senior Research Scientist Lynn Silipigni Connaway will join Rutgers University SC&I faculty members Marie L. Radford and Chirag Shah as Co-Principal Investigators in a study of new models that permit more collaborative and sustainable delivery of virtual reference services. The $250,000 National Leadership Grant recently announced by IMLS will support the project for two years beginning this month. The grant, which was made to Rutgers, represents about 45 percent of overall funding for the project, with the remainder coming from Rutgers and OCLC.
This project, titled 'Cyber Synergy: Seeking Sustainability through Collaboration between Virtual Reference and Social Q&A Sites,' builds on an earlier IMLS-funded collaboration between Rutgers and OCLC, and includes investigation of models that rely upon more extensive collaboration among librarians and subject experts. The earlier effort, 'Seeking Synchronicity: Evaluating Virtual Reference Services from User, Non-User and Librarian Perspectives,' was led by Radford and Connaway and spanned a five-year period. The findings were recently summarised for a broad audience in a report published by OCLC, 'Seeking Synchronicity: Revelations and Recommendations for Virtual Reference'.
The new project will generate findings and recommendations to help members of the library community better understand their options as they implement the next generation of virtual reference services (VRS).
The current project proposes a new model that enables virtual reference services to remain viable despite today's environment of reduced resources. It will investigate the possibility of seamless collaboration between knowledge institutions such as libraries and the Social Q&A (SQA) community. Use statistics indicate that VRS continues to grow as most libraries now offer VRS as popular alternatives to traditional face-to-face reference.
The new project's three phases will identify VRS system enhancements to help achieve sustainability and to collaboratively leverage subject knowledge to meet user needs and heightened expectations. Phase I (Transcript Content Analysis) consists of a longitudinal analysis of 500 randomly selected VRS transcripts and 1000 SQA site transcripts. Phase II (Telephone Interviews and Analysis) includes in-depth phone interviews with 150 subjects from key user and information provider populations. Phase III (Constructing Design Specifications) focuses on creating design specifications to link VRS and SQA to explore solutions for VRS sustainability.
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