Linda Rich

The Changing Access to Electronic Journals: A Survey of Academic Library Web Sites Revisited

This article analyzes the content, organization, and features of academic library electronic journal Web pages and examines major trends that we found. In a replication of a 1997-1998 study, the authors revisited 114 academic library e-journal Web sites from North American universities to see how they have evolved in the past few years. The authors discovered that the Web sites are much more elaborate and sophisticated than just three years ago, and they discuss the four basic organizational models that they see emerging in this field: high maintenance HTML model, new “low maintenance” HTML model, catalog-driven model and database-driven model.

Can Student Assistants Effectively Provide Chat Reference Services? Student Transcripts vs. Librarian Transcripts

ABSTRACT To determine if undergraduate student information desk assistants were effectively staffing the librarys chat reference service, librarians at Bowling Green State University embarked on a chat transcript analysis project, comparing the performance of librarians to student assistants. Although student desk assistants generally did not perform as well as librarians, it was concluded that with a renewed emphasis on continual oversight and training, students were a very viable option for staffing a chat reference service.

Reaching Additional Users with Proactive Chat

ABSTRACT Despite a general decline in recent years in academic libraries’ reference desk statistics, research indicates that library users continue to have complex research questions but are largely unaware that librarians are waiting and ready to assist them. The challenge for librarians is to connect with users at their point of need. At Bowling Green State University, we are making a move in this direction with proactive (pop-up) chat widgets embedded within our library Web pages, catalog, and databases. Since implementation, the number of chat reference questions received has more than doubled, helping us reach additional users from on-and off-campus.