Cyber Synergy

 

    

This project proposes a new model that enables Virtual Reference Services (VRS) to remain viable despite today's environment of reduced resources. It will investigate the possibility of seamless collaboration between knowledge institutions such as libraries and the Social Q&A (SQA) community.

VRS are evolving, with new developments coming at a quickening pace to enhance the user experience, and recently allowing access to library services through text-messaging mobile devices and social networking sites. Empirical data are needed, however, to assess the effectiveness of these services.

The reduction of library budgets increases the need to determine opportunities to share resources and generate revenue through collaboration. SQA services provide such an opportunity.

This research activity will provide evidence for modeling new library collaborative services. The project's three phases will identify VRS system enhancements to help achieve sustainability and to collaboratively leverage subject knowledge to meet user needs and heightened expectations.

Impact

The three phases of the project will have the following results:

• Provide an alternative model for librarians facing tight budgets to fund collaborative VRS.
• Raise awareness of the importance of professional librarians in the broader population.
• Create a model for subject specialists to better utilize their specialized information.
• Longitudinally compare VRS chat, IM (QW), and SQA sites’ accuracy and communication effectiveness.
• Suggest ways to improve VRS services.
• Enable researchers to develop guidelines for practice and recommendations to evaluate VRS.
• Provide a possible venue for libraries in the social networking environment.

Details

Phase I (Transcript Content Analysis)

In Phase I, we will conduct a longitudinal analysis of 500 randomly selected transcripts from OCLC Question Point's (QP) VRS and 1000 randomly sampled Q&A pairs from Yahoo! Answers.

The 500 VRS transcripts will include 300 live chat and 200 Qwidget (QW) Instant Messaging (IM) session transcripts, collected from June 2010 through December 2010.

A sample of Q&A pairs from Yahoo! Answers will include data collected from September 2007 through February 2010. The analysis will build on methods and coding schemes developed for the Seeking Synchronicity activity and results will be compared to chat transcript analysis from that project.

The QP and QW transcripts will undergo the following analyses:

1. Evidence of collaboration, instruction, and referrals;
2. Evidence of impact of geographic dispersion;
3. Ready reference accuracy;
4. Interpersonal communication;
5. Query clarification;
6. Subject,
7. Types of questions;
8. Duration and other time factors;
9. Type of library; and
10. Type of user, when self-disclosed.

We also will analyze a sample of Q&A pairs from the large sample collected from Yahoo! Answers to understand:

1. What type of questions are asked;
2. What is the nature of the answers considered as most satisfactory and/or relevant;
3. Which types of questions do not receive any answers and why;
4. And accuracy of answers.

This analysis is expected to continue for approximately 12 months, from October 2011 to September 2012.

Phase II (Telephone Interviews and Analysis)

In this phase, we will develop data collection instruments and conduct in-depth phone interviews with 150 subjects composed of:

1. Users of QP live chat and QW,
2. Users and expert users of SQA services (expert users are those who provide more and better answers compared to regular users), and
3. VRS librarians.

VRS users will be recruited through a variety of methods, including posting to university and professional library listservs, paper flyers posted at libraries and universities and on social networking sites such as Facebook and pop-up invitations that appear at the end of VRS sessions. We will also reach out to SQA users by sending them recruitment messages using the contact information available on their public profiles. Recruitment will begin early and will continue throughout the grant period. The interviews and their analyses are expected to take about 15 months, from January 2012 to March 2013.

Phase III (Constructing Design Specifications)

Phase III focuses on creating design specifications to link VRS and SQA to explore solutions for VRS sustainability of the proposed research project, the Co-PIs will plan, schedule, recruit participants, and conduct 2 participatory design sessions with policy makers, designers, system experts, and librarians. These designers will be invited to Rutgers University (or via video conferencing) for two sessions lasting an hour to two hours. These design sessions will be developed and conducted over a period of three months from April 2013 to June 2013.

Outputs

In addition to the reports required by IMLS, the Co-PIs will present the results of the three phases of the research in both oral presentations and written papers from January 2012-September 2013 at scholarly and professional LIS conferences. The period of July 2013-September 2013 will be used for concluding analysis, finalizing results, writing and revising articles for publication, as well as for preparing the final report for IMLS.

Reports

IMLS Interim Performance Report 
Radford, Marie L., Lynn Silipigni Connaway, and Chirag Shah. 2013. Cyber Synergy: Seeking Sustainability through Collaboration between Virtual Reference and Social Q&A Sites. IMLS interim performance report. October 31. http://www.oclc.org/content/dam/research/activities/synergy/reports/cyber-synergy-imls-interim-report-2013-10-31.pdf.

IMLS Annual Report 
Radford, Marie L., Lynn Silipigni Connaway, and Chirag Shah. 2012. Cyber Synergy: Seeking Sustainability through Collaboration between Virtual Reference and Social Q&A Sites. IMLS annual report. November 6. http://www.oclc.org/content/dam/research/activities/synergy/reports/cyber-synergy-imls-annual-report-2012.pdf.

Papers

Radford, Marie L., Lynn Silipigni Connaway, Stephanie Mikitish, Mark Alpert, Chirag Shah, and Nicole A. Cooke. 2016. “Shared Values, New Vision: Collaboration and Communities of Practice in Virtual Reference and SQA.” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 68, no. 2: 438-449.

Shah, Chirag, Radford, Marie L., and Lynn Silipigni Connaway. 2015. “Collaboration and Synergy in Hybrid Q&A: Participatory Design Method and Results.” Library and Information Science Research 37, no. 2: 92-99.

Radford, Marie L., and Lynn Silipigni Connaway. 2013. “Not Dead Yet! A Longitudinal Study of Query Type and Ready Reference Accuracy in Live Chat and IM Reference.” Library and Information Science Research 35, no. 1: 2-13. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2012.08.001.
View preprint.
This paper won the 2013 ALISE/Bohdan S. Wynar Research Paper Competition.

Radford, Marie L., Lynn Silipigni Connaway, Stephanie Mikitish, Mark Alpert, Chirag Shah, and Nicole A. Cooke. 2013. “Conceptualizing Collaboration and Community in Virtual Reference and Social Question and Answer Services.” Information Research 18, no. 3. http://InformationR.net/ir/18-3/colis/paperS06.html.

Radford, Marie L., Lynn Silipigni Connaway, and Chirag Shah. 2012. “Convergence and Synergy: Social Q&A Meets Virtual Reference Services.” In ASIST 2012: Proceedings of the 75th Annual Meeting: Information, Interaction, Innovation, edited by Andrew Grove, vol. 49. Silver Spring, MD: American Society for Information Science and Technology. http://www.asis.org/asist2012/proceedings/submissions/111.pdf.

Shah, Chirag, Marie L. Radford, Lynn Silipigni Connaway, Erik Choi, and Vanessa Kitzie. 2012. “’How Much Change Do You Get from 40$?’ Analyzing and Addressing Failed Questions on Social Q&A.” In ASIST 2012: Proceedings of the 75th Annual Meeting: Information, Interaction, Innovation, edited by Andrew Grove, vol. 49. Silver Spring, MD: American Society for Information Science and Technology. http://www.asis.org/asist2012/proceedings/openpage.html.

Presentations

Radford, Marie L., Lynn Silipigni Connaway, and Stephanie Mikitish. 2014. “Collaboration and Crowdsourcing: Synergistic Solutions for Sustainable Virtual Reference, an Analysis of Critical Incidents.” Presented at the Library Research Seminar VI, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, October 9.
View presentation.

Marie L. Radford, Lynn Silipigni Connaway, Stephanie Mikitish, Mark Alpert, Chirag Shah, and Nicole A. Cooke. 2013. “Conceptualizing Collaboration & Community in Virtual Reference & Social Q&A.” Presented at the CoLIS 8 Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science, Copenhagen, Denmark, August 19-22.
View presentation.

Shah, Chirag, Daqing He, Marie L. Radford, Jung Sun Oh, and Lynn Silipigni Connaway. 2013. “Collaboration in Action: Enabling Innovative Scholarship with Social and Crowdsourcing Services.” Presented at the iConference 2013, Fort Worth, Texas, February 12-15.
View presentation.  

Radford, Marie L., Lynn Silipigni Connaway, and Chirag Shah. 2013. “’You Don't Want to be a Dead-end.’ VRS Librarians on Collaboration & SQA.” Presented at the iConference 2013, Fort Worth, Texas, February 12-15.
View presentation.

Radford, Marie L., and Lynn Silipigni Connaway. 2013. “Not Dead Yet: A Longitudinal Study of Query Type and Ready Reference Accuracy in Live Chat and IM Reference.” Presented at the 2013 ALISE Annual Conference, Seattle, Washington, January 24.
View presentation.

Radford, Marie L., Lynn Silipigni Connaway, and Chirag Shah. 2012. “Convergence and Synergy: Social Q&A Meets Virtual Reference Services.” Presented at the American Society for Information Science and Technology 75th Annual Meeting, Baltimore, Maryland, October 30.
View presentation.

Shah, Chirag, Marie L. Radford, Lynn Silipigni Connaway, Erik Choi, and Vanessa Kitzie. 2012. “’How much change do you get from 40$?’—Analyzing and Addressing Failed Questions on Social Q&A.” Presented at the American Society for Information Science and Technology 75th Annual Meeting, Baltimore, Maryland, October 28.
View presentation.

Radford, Marie L., and Lynn Silipigni Connaway. 2012. “Extending Our Virtual Reach: A Longitudinal Study of Query Type and Accuracy in Live Chat and IM Reference.” Presented at the 2012 ALISE Annual Conference, Dallas, Texas, January 17.
View presentation.

Radford, Mare L., Chirag Shah, Lorri Mon, and Rich Gazan. 2011. “Stepping Stones to Synergy: Social Q&A and Virtual Reference.” Panel presented at the American Society for Information Science and Technology 2011 Annual Meeting, New Orleans, Louisiana, October 11.

More Information

The project proposal (.pdf: 3.9MB/115 pp.) provides an in-depth discussion of the project, including background and research objectives, methodology, impact, and expected results.

The analysis will build on methods and coding schemes developed for Seeking Synchronicity (Radford & Connaway, 2005-2008) and results will be compared to chat transcript analysis from that project.  More information on that project can be found at http://www.oclc.org/research/activities/synchronicity/default.htm.

Most recent updates: Page content: 2012-12-10

Team Members

Current

• Lynn Silipigni Connaway, OCLC, Co-Principal Investigator
• Marie Radford, Rutgers University, Co-Principal Investigator
• Chirag Shah, Rutgers University, Co-Principal Investigator
• Erin Hood, OCLC
• Vanessa Kitzie, Rutgers University, vkitzie@gmail.com
• Stephanie Mitikish, Rutgers University, mikitish@eden.rutgers.edu

Past

• Jeremy Browning, OCLC
• Erik Choi, Rutgers University, erikchoi@gmail.com
• Alyssa Darden, OCLC
• Mary Ennis, Rutgers University, mhve@eden.rutgers.edu
• Susan T. Wengler, Rutgers University