[WEB4LIB] People-assisted answering services

[Donna Reed]

Thus far it seems like webhelp is our biggest "competitor".  According to
Anne Lipow, Webhelp prides itself in giving "librarian-like" service.  Its
employees are hired "off the street" and given 40 hours of training.  A
lot of it is geared to encourage repeat usage or in commercial terms
stickiness.

Library of Congress is about to launch a pilot of a service that will
eventually be available on a membership basis to all libraries around the
world.  The service is starting out as an L2L (library to library) system
and will open up so that eventually customers of member libraries will be
able to use it for reference.  Diane Kresh and Linda Arret of LC presented
information about it at ALA's mid-winter conference last week and there
will be a talk table about it at PLA this year.  There is a Web site about
it at http://lcweb.loc.gov/rr/digiref/.  It is somewhat out of date, but
LC plans to update it soon.

Donna Reed
Multnomah County Library

 On Tue, 18 Jan 2000, Sloan, Bernie wrote:

> 
> Nick Tomaiuolo's recent posting concerning automated answering services like
> AskJeeves reminded me that I recently ran across another non-library
> "people-assisted" answering service on the Web (WebHelp.com). I now know of
> four such services:
> 
> http://www.allexperts.com
> http://www.expertcentral.com
> http://www.inforocket.com
> http://www.webhelp.com
> 
> WebHelp.com seems to be a pretty ambitious undertaking. Supposedly they have
> 900 employees, and have a North American center of operations based in
> Minot, ND. They hire people to provide the service, rather than relying on
> the volunteer experts that many other sites use. Most of the corporate
> officers have backgrounds in customer service call centers, and WebHelp
> seems to be patterned on this model.
> 
> If any of you know of any such services that I haven't listed above, please
> send me the URL.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Bernie Sloan
> Senior Library Information Systems Consultant
> University of Illinois Office for Planning and Budgeting
> 338 Henry Administration Building
> 506 S. Wright Street
> Urbana, IL  61801
> Phone:  (217) 333-4895
> Fax:      (217) 333-6355
> E-mail:  bernies at uillinois.edu
> 
> 

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Donna Reed                            Multnomah County Library
Community Information System                TEL (503) 248-5238
Program Specialist		            FAX (503) 248-5226
         
          E-mail: donnare at nethost.multnomah.lib.or.us
                http://www.multnomah.lib.or.us/