When I heard that a half day Virtual Reference (VR) training session was going to be held in Sydney I immediately paid the nominal $30 fee because I thought it was a valuable skill to learn and until now I’d never heard of Virtual Reference training offered anywhere in Sydney.

The session was run by Sue Rockwell, one of the co-administrators of the Australian Chasing the Sun (CTS) virtual reference service and the Senior Librarian at The Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Adelaide.

The aim of the Chasing the Sun (CTS) service is to provide an after business hours on-line professional reference service for patient care. The service takes advantage of global time differences between countries to offer out-of-hours librarian support for clinicians.

The training session explained the background behind CTS and used the OCLC Questionpoint system (example shown below) to teach participants basic VR skills

Skills You Need For Effective VR

“Even the most savvy reference librarian needs to learn new skills and develop new habits or behaviours to be successful in the virtual environment – especially when using chat technology or other synchronous communication medium” Anne Grodzin Lipow

VR via instant messaging live chat systems will be most effective if you use the same language and types of words as the user

So if they ask questions using abbreviations and SMS language reply that way and vice versa if someone asks you questions using full English language sentences reply that way.

Some rules of conversational behaviour do not work in live chat eg: taking turns at talking. Feel free to send several short messages in a row rather than typing a one single long response.

Non verbal ques are not there – therefore you need to keep replies short and use standby messages like “Searching … Back in a min” to indicate that you still have more to say.

Remember that you never get up from the reference desk or put the phone down to go and look something up without telling your user what you are going to do and how long it will take.Just the same for live VR chat. Remember silence in VR is the same as you ignoring a person during a face-to-face reference session.

• Keyboard proficiency and ability to type quickly
• Familiarity with multitasking in a multiple window environment
• Obtain the greatest, most precise information about what is needed.
• Understand at what level the material is needed and how much is required
• Complete the interview and arrive at the necessary key data in as short a period as possible.

Best Practice During a VR Session

• Greet the user and use his/her name in the conversation if they tell you it.
• Identify yourself by name. You can use a false name, but use one. This is very important to establish rapport with the user.
• Use scripted “Cut and Paste” messages for common statements because they’re much quicker than typing. For example: “Hi, this is the State Library. My name is Bob, how I can I help you?”
• All users aren’t the same. Some will want an answer in 5 seconds, others will be willing to wait 5-10 minutes.
• Some queries are unreasonable to be answered in a few minutes. Tell the user this and get their email address to send them your search results later.
• Ask the question – are you in an urgent hurry for this? You need this info to make a judgement on how to deliver an answer.
• Remember to make contact frequently – “little and often” is the best motto! Tell the user what you’re doing constantly
• Conduct the reference interview as you would on the phone – ask for clarification to ensure you understand what the user needs.
• An Internet search may not provide the best answer – remember the range of library resources available. Use them.
• Don’t overwhelm the user with too much at once. Ask if more is needed.
• Confirm which library resources the user can access (you can’t send a database search result web-page – you had to log on to do the search remember)
• Ask if the information is on track. Get clarification all the way through the session.
• Thank the user and ask for an evaluation of the service if they have time
• Cite the source for any information you give the user.

Health libraries or groups of health libraries interested in learning more should contact the Chasing the Sun service co-ordinators. It costs a mere $50/yr for your health sector library to become a member of the Chasing the Sun service!