Bibliographic record
Abstract
The ten chapters of this multiauthored work are grouped into four parts: “Chat Reference,” “Training and Staffing,” “Evaluation,” and “Innovative Approaches.” Brief biographical sketches are given for the seventeen authors and four editors. Contributors come from the United States, Canada, and Denmark and different types of libraries and library schools, though none is from a medical library. The book consists of the “best” papers from a conference on virtual reference. “Chat Reference” deals with teenagers and impatient and rude encounters, providing verbatim transcripts and offering sound advice. Some teen questions are amusing and amazing, and some of the rude encounters would test any librarian's patience. These two chapters are instructive for anyone dealing with the public in a virtual environment. The advice on avoiding unpleasant or difficult interactions applies to almost any reference context. The chapters on “Training and Staffing” describe a workshop at the University of Maryland and a survey of staffing issues at Canadian universities. The advice, once more, is presented with practical suggestions. Sufficient detail is given about the workshop and feedback from it that one could use the chapter in setting up a similar course. Most of the sixteen Canadian libraries did not hire additional staff to provide virtual reference, and the chapter discusses the “sacrifice” entailed. “Evaluation” has a chapter on setting performance targets and another on creating a knowledgebase of digital reference transactions. In one chapter, the Vancouver Public Library pondered measuring success and set performance targets. The project in the second chapter involved a complex survey and analysis for developing a “schema” that would pull together material from disparate sources into a “Digital Reference Electronic Warehouse.” A Danish consortium of public and academic libraries supported by the Danish National Library Authority is profiled in the first chapter of “Innovative Approaches.” A “veteran” (about-to-retire) librarian at the Goddard Space Flight Center provides experienced advice on the building of a knowledgebase. Librarians from Florida's Orange County Library System describe how they installed wi-fi technology. Photographs and diagrams illustrate how the system works and depict happy library users. Finally, Rutgers University librarians describe a “virtual collaboratory” with industry to develop a course on “Food and Nutrition Business Informatics and Communication” by combining existing technology and resources. A final chapter summarizes the book and suggests that the “agenda” does not provide a complete picture of digital reference. This chapter does not seem particularly useful, especially because technology has already moved on since the conference was held and the book then written. Overall, the strengths of this book are its practicality and the wide variety of contexts and issues discussed. The libraries are diverse: public, academic, large, small, North American, European, supported by government, supported by industry. Details of software and other technology are given. Numerous tables of statistics explain the scope of each project. Plentiful references after every chapter lead to further resources. Even though health sciences environments are not represented, consumer health librarians and anyone who deals with less-than-gracious patrons would find the human aspects interesting. The staffing and evaluation issues are universal, as are the technologies. There are other books on virtual reference, including at least one specifically addressing medical libraries, but anyone considering setting up such a service should probably collect as much as possible on the subject.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".