job description-->electronic reference desk

[R124C41 at aol.com]

The electronic reference desk discussion and work going on in a number of
places is interesting in that the tasks describe sound a lot like our help
desk activities at my work.

We have implemented there a commercial help desk page called Action Response
System from a company called Remedy (see http://www.remedy.com/) to perform
many of the same tasks described for the reference business process but in a
help desk situation.

This includes notifying "experts" of questions that have been called into the
help desk which the help desk has determined that particular expert is best
qualified to answer and so on.

Of course, the assumed arrangement is that the experts and the help desk
people all have terminals (preferably gui terminals like Pc's, Mac's or X
terminals) on their desks.  The calls are put into an Oracle database as are
the responses and resolutions.  I suspect other databases are supported.

This sort of system is put into place in support of 1-800- lines and other
businesses where handling and tracking of customer queries is critical.  

(Did you ever think of starting a 1-900-LIBRARY service to try to make money
handling reference questions nationwide?  Presumably, you use one of these
systems and issue rollerskates and cellular phones to free lance reference
librarians strategically placed in all the best libraries in, say, the
Chicagoland area.  Oh, well, it's too late as we have learned with respect to
the asparagus recipe question being discussed in parallel.)

I realize it would be a rare library that could afford to take this approach
with all the infrastructure required.   But it might nevertheless be
interesting to look at business approaches in this area when one is
automating the library business processes related to reference desk
activities.

Business help situations have, for example, dealt with notifying people (the
systems will even automatically page them) who are away from their terminals
though I am not sure I would want to get paged at 2 am to answer a question
about asparagus.

It's interesting to think about the meta-dynamics of the implementation of
such systems in companies as compared to the implementation in libraries and
ask oneself why each (who both presumably live or die on the quality of their
customer response) has chosen the particular path.  

I think there are a couple of factors (some of which may be controversial in
this audience):

1.  Libraries tend to have a mandated funding situation which is not highly
and immediately coupled to how well they answer questions.  Companies do not.
 Therefore, instrumenting the help desk to measure its responses so that it
can be managed ("you can't manage what you don't measure") is considered
crucial in the company area and complex, even expensive tools are applied).
The approach in reference desks on the other hand is to make little tick
marks on pieces of paper.

2.  Libraries tend to have a highly professional staff in reference
operations.  The professional ethic is said to (and probably does to a great
extent) keep the quality of the effort very high.  Companies tend to staff
the help desk with non-professional (read low-paid) help (at least as
compared to the experts).  They then make an effort to monitor responses as a
way of making sure what is going out in response to help requests is
accurate.  That is, can you imagine a call to a reference desk encountering
the pre-recorded announcement (as one has with the IRS, for example) that
calls will be monitored to insure the accuracy of the advice given?

Of course, this may have something to do with the small salary differential
between those who answer the phone in the reference desk area and those who
are the experts who responsd as compared to the differential between help
desk and experts in the company area.

Conclusion:  it seems like what we have here in the tools being used to
handle company help desk area and the library reference desk area are two
different solutions to the same or very similar business problem.

I have in mind the model of a very complicated equation which allows of
several solutions to its unknown variable which represents the tools that
should be supplied to handle the reference/help desk problem while minimizing
the costs.

Comments?

David Ritchie
Naperville, IL

R124C41 at AOL.COM

P.S. Of course I am not unaware that the questions being answer in reference
desk areas are often times much more complex and hard to categorize than
those in typical help desk situations.