Abstract
This study considered two Web-based virtual reference services (VRS) at an academic library in Israel: chat (116 interactions) and email (213 exchanges). The contents of a set of questions and answers in both VRS services were analyzed, along with an open-ended questionnaire administered to the library's reference team (n = 16). Differences were found in the question and answer distributions. Face-to-face reference is preferred by the librarians although they acknowledge that the best fitting service is dependent on the users' preferences and their information needs.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 139-146 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | Library and Information Science Research |
| Volume | 37 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 1 Apr 2015 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2015 Elsevier Inc.
Funding
The authors would like to thank the University of Haifa's reference library staff for their willingness to share their data and thoughts. The survey was performed as part of the work toward a PhD degree of the first author at the Department of Information Science at Bar-Ilan University, under the supervision of the second author and is supported by a grant from the Israel Ministry of Culture and Sport, Libraries Department .
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Department of Information Science at Bar-Ilan University | |
| Israel Ministry of Culture and Sport | |
| Libraries Department |