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Best Practices in Virtual Reference

The panel presented two innovative approaches to improving reference service for our users: building a better search engine using the knowledge of reference librarians, and building a multilingual, multinational reference service.

  • Multilingual, Multinational networks and Reference Extract [Streaming video, 00:15:16]
    Paul Ulrich discussed how he has formed partnerships with librarians throughout the world to provide reference services in 27 languages to his users.

    Paul S. Ulrich is an American who has worked in the Berlin Central and Regional Library (until 1995 in the America Memorial Library) for over 30 years. For the past 13 years he has been in the Information Services Department. He has published many professional articles and books, is on the editorial board of Online Information Review and regularly conducts workshops on using the internet for reference services for the Goethe Institute.

  • Reference Extract—Obligations and Opportunities [Streaming video, 00:22:08]
    David Lankes discussed Reference Extract, an exciting new project that envisions taking the work that librarians do as part of a reference transaction and using this information to bring more credible results to web searching.  The Reference Extract project is currently being planned to aggregate the power of librarians to improve how people find information on the web. The session is both an overview of building a "credibility engine," and an invitation to be a part of and guide the project.

    R. David Lankes is director of the Information Institute of Syracuse, and an associate professor in Syracuse University's School of Information Studies. He is also a fellow at ALA's Office for Information Technology Policy. Lankes has always been interested in combining theory and practice to create active research projects that make a difference.

Following the presentations Susan McGlamery, Global Product Manager, OCLC, facilitated a question and answer session. [Streaming video, 00:15:00]

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