PNLA Quarterly, Vol. 62 No.4 Summer 1998

E-Mail Reference: Experiences at City University

By Laura Staley, Business Librarian, City University Library, Renton, WA

What do you do when you live in Bangkok, Thailand, and need industry ratios for your MBA finance class? Or you are stationed in Saudi Arabia and need articles on the computer industry for a marketing class? City University students can email City University library for answers to their reference questions. Reference by email is invaluable to shut-ins, to people too busy to come to the library, or to people who are located too far from their library to make a trip possible. One study suggests that we have another category of email reference patron: those who can come to or call the library, but for various reasons prefer the email form (Bushallow-Wilber 1996:359). E-mail reference occurs in academic libraries, special libraries, and in public libraries. This article discusses our experiences in doing reference by email over the last two years.

Advantages

E-mail reference service is available any time of day. Unlike the library, the email box is always open. This is especially useful for our City University students who are several time zones away from Renton, Washington. As one of our Distance Learning students told me, it's difficult to find a good time to call Renton from Japan, even when the library is open twelve hours a day.

Reference questions for someone across the world can be answered in a day rather than the days-to-weeks an airmail letter takes. One City University student taking classes from a research station in Antarctica received no mail at all for four or five months of the year. E-mail, phone, and fax were the only ways he could receive reference assistance. Home computers with e-mail accounts seem to be far more pervasive than home fax machines. Prior to e-mail, librarians were limited to two options -- reading the information over the phone or faxing - to serve remote patrons in need of immediate information. Staff time and phone charges can make faxing too costly. Reading the information to the patron over the phone works if the information is simple. E-mail provides a pervasive and inexpensive solution. The savings in staff time is lessened, however, if you find yourself typing in large amounts of material for a patron. Another advantage of e-mail reference is the relative permanence of an e-mail message. This is especially true when dealing with questions, such as industry ratios, where the answer is a group of numbers.

Disadvantages

Non-verbal cues are missing. In-person reference takes cues from the patron's body language; questions are rephrased, facial expressions are seen, comments are addressed. Librarians look for cues that say "we're on the right track" or "this isn't what I want." Visual cues at the reference desk also tell us what level of resources will be most useful to the patron (Abels 1996).

The reference interview relies completely on the written word. It may require e-mail correspondence back and forth several times to determine exactly what the patron wants. Abels (1996) suggests that every reference question should take between three exchanges -- the question by the patron, a summary of the question by the librarian, and a confirmation of the question by the patron -- and five -- the three already listed plus a second round of summarization by the librarian, and a confirmation by the patron. While this may be accurate for searches on research topics, ready reference can usually be completed in two exchanges -- the question asked and the question answered.

A related disadvantage is the frequently terse composition of e-mail. Students may talk about their reference question for several minutes in person but limit themselves to two or three sentences when sending e-mail. Replies may tend to be equally short, based on training that it is more correct to express ourselves as briefly as possible in e-mail. It's training that may not always be appropriate in the reference setting.

Two years of Experience at City University

The following recommendations are based on two years of e-mail reference experience.

Ask for feedback. Restate their original questions and request explicit feedback from the patron in your reply. If the patron didn't get what they wanted, this may encourage them to rephrase the question.

Include information in requests for clarification. If you need to clarify a reference question, it's encouraging to include some information in your reply. For example, "I need to know about the population of China" was an actual e-mail reference question. This was the response: "The population of China was 1,210,005,000 in 1996. (Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1996, page 831.) Was that the information you needed? Were you interested in other aspects of China's population? Do you need information on male/female ratio, number of minorities, customs, etc? Please let me know if you need more information."

Use one central e-mail box to discourage students from corresponding with a particular librarian. Distribution of questions and management of the program are much more convenient from a central location.

Include email procedures and limits in advertisements. For example, indicate how frequently e-mail is checked and provide approximate response times. Specify what kinds of questions may be answered by email. For example, some questions require photocopies of pages from reference works and will need to be mailed. Also, suggest that they submit a follow-up e-mail again in two or three days if they haven't received a reply. E-mail can be a little less reliable than surface mail. Servers go down. Messages get lost.

Include a reference questionnaire in any advertisements. For periodicals, this might include such questions as "How many citations do you want to see?" or "How old can the citations be?" Abels (1996) includes suggestions for the contents of e-mail reference forms that can be provide a model for the development of appropriate forms.

Conclusions

There is increasing concern that libraries need to be active in promoting information literacy. We must not only provide patrons with information but teach them to evaluate that information. The DigREF listserv has recently been the site of a discussion about how much bibliographic instruction can or should be done via email. It is difficult to teach via email. We can't physically walk and talk the patron through the reference process, demonstrating how we find the answer to their question. Do we need to incorporate teaching in our all of our email reference? How do we do that? These are questions that we have yet to answer.

Doing reference by email is a different experience from working the Reference desk. For one thing, it lacks the immediacy of an in-person reference interview. It is as interesting as working the reference desk, however. In the last two years, the City University reference staff has gained some unexpected competencies. I realized this when I talked someone through the process of retrieving an email attachment I'd sent him--something I couldn't have done two years ago. As well as being a useful service to the patron, e-mail reference can be a valuable staff development experience.

Literature Cited

Abels, Eileen G. 1996. "The E-mail Reference Interview." RQ 35: 345-358.

Bushallow-Wilber, Lara, Gemma De Vinney, and Fritz Whitcomb. 1996. "Electronic Mail Reference Service: A Study." RQ 35:359-371.