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Sunday, March 16, 2008

Of Subject Experts and Generalists:Two-Tiered Service Models

A few recent discussions with my colleagues and some interactions with patrons have me thinking a lot lately about the roles of the subject expert and the generalist in library chat services. Many of us librarians are experts in a few areas and generalists in many. Sometimes, questions really need a subject expert and really, no one else will be able to help. Other times, sure, a subject expert might give the quickest and deepest response, but the patron will probably also get very good help from one of a few librarians available. Yet other times, simply connecting to the generalists will be absolutely fine, perhaps with a case for later referral to a subject expert.

A lot of academic libraries are developing really nice, detailed subject guides and course pages currently. These typically have contact information for a subject expert at least and often will also contain contact information for a reference department or some other general help line for when that subject specialist is not immediately available.

This brings us to libraryh3lp's Presence API. With embedded chat widgets, it's very common practice to just show the widget and let the built-in presence indicator show the user whether the librarian is online or offline. Now, in the case where a subject expert is preferred, but a generalist will probably be able to help as well, we can create a new case: If the subject expert is online, show their widget, but if the subject expert is offline, show this other widget for the general reference desk.

Blogger is rather limiting in display of code chunks, but there are a couple of code examples on the wiki.

Going a bit further, and thinking of libraryh3lp queues, it would be possible to have queues for various areas of subject expertise, with or without rollover to a more generalist service when the experts are not available. Let's say I create a queue for help with business research, and I add two librarians to that queue. If at least one of those librarians is online, they'll get the questions from that queue. If neither of them is online, those questions can go to the general reference desk, where someone might still be able to help. If an area is extremely specialized, perhaps rolling over to the generalist service is not appropriate, and something else happens when the experts' queue is offline (e-mail form, chat widget does not display, etc).

This might be a good time to mention that one of the next features Eric is working on writing is chat transfer. The ability to transfer a chat---or IM---to another libraryh3lp queue will be very nice for appropriate referral of questions. ETA on that feature: 2-4 weeks.

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