Cost, statistics, measures, and standards for digital reference services: a preliminary view - Academic Libraries

Library Trends, Wntr, 2003 by R. David Lankes, Melissa Gross, Charles R. McClure

ABSTRACT

THIS PAPER REPORTS ON WORK FROM TWO STUDIES IN PROGRESS related to assessing digital library reference services and developing standards that support such services. The paper suggests that two types of standards--utilization and technical--should be considered together in the costing, statistics, and measures for digital reference services. The digital reference community has the opportunity to embed quality standards and assessment data into software and infrastructure by linking utilization and technical standards early in the evolution of digital reference markets. Such an approach would greatly enhance the collection and analysis of a range of cost data related to digital reference service.

1. INTRODUCTION

This paper outlines the current status of standards (both utilization and technical) in digital reference with special attention given to issues of cost; both costs incurred by adopting standards, as well as means of assessing cost in digital reference. The article represents preliminary results of a study to develop methods to assess the quality of digital reference services and ongoing work to develop technical standards in digital reference.

The Information Institute of Syracuse at Syracuse University and the Information Use Management and Policy Institute at Florida State University conducted the first study. This study is developing digital reference measures; testing and refining these measures and quality standards to describe digital reference services; and producing a guidebook that describes how to collect and report data for these measures and standards.

This study began at the October 2000 Virtual Reference Desk (VRD) Conference in Seattle, where the growing digital reference community identified assessment of quality as a top research priority. As patrons demand more services online, and as reference librarians seek to better meet patrons' information needs through the Internet, it has become essential to determine common standards quality. Library administrators need strong, grounded metrics and commonly understood data to support digital reference services, assess the success of these services, determine resource allocation to services, and determine a means for constant improvement of digital reference within their institutions. Project information about this effort can be found at http://quartz.syr.edu/quality/.> The second source for this article comes from ongoing work to develop technical standards in digital reference. This work is represented by the development of the Question Interchange Profile (Lankes, 2002) and the newly initiated work of NISO (National Information Standards Organization) Standards Committee AZ (NISO, 2002). This work responds to an increasing call by vendors and technical service staff for clear guidelines to ensure interoperability. Project information about this and related standards efforts can be found at http://www.niso.org/.> While, at first, utilization and technical standards may be seen as separate, this paper argues that both, tightly coupled, are essential for the advancement of digital reference and to truly capture a holistic picture of cost. While utilization standards may determine formulae and approaches to determining the total cost of digital reference, technical standards both impact this cost (through tool development or software acquisition), as well as provide a means of distributing and/or recouping these costs. For example, in a consortia, setting a per-question cost can be determined. Properly developed technical standards can "carry" this cost with the question (for example, by providing a field with a dollar figure), greatly easing accounting and enabling the creation of a "question economy" where consortia members can bid on questions or do automated routing to the most cost-effective answer source. These concepts will be expanded below.

2. A DIGITAL REFERENCE PRIMER

For the purposes of this paper, digital reference is defined as human-intermediated assistance offered to users through the Internet. Today, libraries are offering a range of human-intermediated reference services over the Internet at an increasing rate. Research by Joe Janes and his colleagues (Janes, 2000) found that 45 percent of academic libraries and 12.8 percent of public libraries offer some type of digital reference service. These services are often ad hoc and experimental. Janes and McClure (1999) found that, for quick factual questions, librarians using only the Web answered a sample of questions as well as did those using only print sources. Many libraries conduct digital reference service in addition to existing obligations with little sense of the scale of such work or its strategic importance to the library.

This paper does not provide a comprehensive review or analysis of digital reference and digital reference services. Gross, McClure, and Lankes (2002) have published elsewhere a detailed analysis of digital reference literature. Despite this and other such reviews, there is limited knowledge about costs, assessment, and standards related to digital reference services. As the studies discussed in this paper are completed, one product will be a manual to assist librarians assessing digital reference services on a range of criteria and measures (McClure, et al., 2002).