remote reference using netmeeting

[Karin Smith]

Hello 
I am interested in getting together some sort of working 
group/ discussion group to work on the idea of implementing a 
remote reference service using netmeeting. 
I was involved in  a 
seminar in January this year in Sydney with Anne Lipow. She 
talked about the importance to  our profession of 
providing a service to patrons who are  coming into libraries 
less as the internet is becoming a more accessible source of 
information. She emphasised in her paper that it is not the patrons 
who are remote from us - it is we  who are remote from the patrons. 
At the seminar we  used netmeeting to demonstrate potiential 
interaction with a remote user by connecting to another librarian in 
Sydney. I am inspired to try to implement something and I am 
giving a paper on remote reference in September. 

It feels a bit awesome but I am interested in the potential of 
providing a service across time zones. There are a lot of issues that 
make it all challenging.

A little bit about myself and my institution:
 CSU is an Australian 
university with a large cohort of distance education students. One of 
my concerns is that we provide as many online information resources  
as we can but nothing replaces an interaction with a human when you 
are stuck trying to find some information or in our case, use a 
database or the catalogue. I encourage people to ring our free number 
but they rarely do. There are  many issues surrounding this. e.g. out 
of hours service is very important to us because our students will be 
doing their study at night - I don't know if an international link up 
is appropriate; the technology - our staff need to add this to their 
already busy job and also the clients - what equipment do they have?; 
where do we put the icons to entice people to use the service? I 
think the issue of remote reference is an important one but I don't 
think the technology has quite caught up - it will have to be as 
invisible as email to be really effective.

Please contact me if you are interested in discussing this further

Thanks
Karin

 


..........................................
Karin Smith
Information Services Librarian
Division of Library Services
Charles Sturt University
Panorama Ave 
Bathurst NSW 2795
Australia
ph 02 6338 4486
fax 02 6338 4163