Ensuring Quality in a Virtual Reference Environment

Abstract

Abstract Soon after AskALibrarian, Florida's Statewide Virtual Reference Desk, began to offer Chat Reference to the public in 2003, a Quality Assurance Workgroup was established to ensure that the service patrons received would be friendly, accurate, and adequate. To make certain that best practices were used in answering the real time questions, two methods of evaluation were quickly put into place. One of these was a patron survey, which appeared directly after the chat ended. The other method involved the forming of a Quality Assurance Workgroup of academic and public librarians who would read chat transcripts and select the best one(s) that followed designated criteria for good virtual reference service. This paper presents statistics from the patron survey results and quotes from actual transcripts, which demonstrate how the Quality Assurance Workgroup used designated criteria in choosing the Best Chats for the month.