The Effects of Librarians’ Behavioral Performance on User Satisfaction in Chat Reference Services

Librarians’ Behavioral Performance during Chat Reference Service

The body of the reference service literature has consistently emphasized that the quality of the reference interview is an important factor in reference service effectiveness. In their seminal research, Gers and Seward demonstrated that reference librarians’ verbal and nonverbal communication skills during the reference interview are crucial in delivering reference services successfully.⁵ This research has had a great affect on the research and the practice of reference services, and has brought attention to the need for pertinent staff training that can provide instruction in, and emphasize the importance of, verbal and nonverbal communication skills in the reference interview. Saxton reported that reference effectiveness was most consistently predicted by the presence of verbal and nonverbal behaviors prescribed in the original guidelines.⁶ Subsequent studies also reported similar findings, substantiating RUSA’s initial intent to provide the original guidelines as a service assessment tool.⁷

Yet, many issues remain veiled regarding the interactions between librarians and patrons in virtual space in general, and reference interviews during chat sessions specifically. Some of the important but unanswered questions are:

• How do reference librarians interact with their patrons in chat reference settings?
• Are the interactions in chat reference similar to, or considerably different from, those in traditional reference services?
• What staff behaviors would be most conducive to user satisfaction with chat reference services?

Regarding these questions, some would argue that the interactions between patrons and librarians in chat settings should not be fundamentally different from those involved in the physical reference setting because both ultimately serve the same purpose–resolving information problems by answering questions. In essence, proponents of this position view chat reference as the same service delivered via a different medium, much like the telephone reference service that was new in the 1930s. In contrast, others would contend that the particular mode of virtual communications is the very factor that makes chat reference different from the face-to-face or the telephone reference interview. After all, virtual communication lacks facial, aural, or environmental cues, which are crucial components in the physical reference setting, as well as the voice cues that are so crucial to phone reference.⁸

In the absence of clear understanding of the nature of chat reference interactions, identifying effective librarian behaviors in the chat reference interview will be an important first step in helping librarians to achieve higher levels of service performance. In this regard, specific behaviors prescribed in the revised guidelines can be utilized as effective behavioral standards to examine librarians’ actual behaviors while answering questions during chat sessions. Thus, the purpose of the present study was to investigate the extent to which the behaviors prescribed in the revised guidelines are observed in chat reference sessions, and whether the presence of those behaviors (hereinafter referred to as “RUSA behaviors”) increases user satisfaction with chat reference. For this purpose, three specific research questions were proposed for investigation:

• Research question 1: To what extent is each RUSA behavior observed in chat reference interviews?
• Research question 2: Is user satisfaction with chat reference higher when librarians perform the RUSA behaviors during reference sessions than when they do not?
• Research question 3: Which of the RUSA behaviors performed during chat reference interviews could predict higher user satisfaction?

The findings of the present study will enable us to determine whether the RUSA behaviors can lead to more effective reference services performance. Ultimately, the results of the study will help us to resolve the question of whether the revised guidelines can be effectively used as a pertinent training and service assessment tool for chat reference services.

Methods

Setting and Participants

The present study examined chat reference services delivered through the Broward County public library system, the largest such system in Florida, with thirty-three regional and branch libraries. Since August 2002, the system has used a chat reference service dubbed “24/7 Reference” delivered by the Metropolitan Cooperative Library System (MCLS), an association of libraries located in the greater Los Angeles area funded by a federal Library Services and Technology Act grant. MCLS’s 24/7 Reference was merged with Online Computer Library Center’s (OCLC) QuestionPoint in August 2004.

The data examined for the present study were online chat reference transactions initiated by patrons of the Broward Country library system, along with survey responses submitted by the patrons. While the patrons were mostly users of the Broward County system, the reference staff members who provided the service were from forty-nine library systems across the United States participating in the MCLS 24/7 Reference program. During the six-month duration of the research study, between January and June 2004, a total of 1,387completed or transferred transactions took place. As the intention of this study was to analyze the influence of librarians’ behaviors on user satisfaction, only the transactions that had a corresponding completed self-report user satisfaction survey were selected for data analysis. Thus, the total number of transactions analyzed for the present study was 422, comprising 30.4 percent of the total analyzable transactions.

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