Denver Day Two

Just wrapping up lunch with two most excellent Portland State U librarians I've been spending time with (and Phil of course), waiting for this afternoon's plenary panel starring R. David Lankes and Marie L. Radford, two Doctor Librarians who do lots of research and publishing on Virtual Reference - I'm pretty psyched (geek geek).

Speaking of which, there's a table out there with some good books about VR - some theory, some practice. Some of which are sitting at my desk at VPL and some that I've never seen (I am currently nagging Phil to buy them).

Some of these books are really helplful, and I would advise purchasing a few. I can offer more specific recommendations at a later date.

Hoping on the new website to include selected professional development resources. I think I mentioned the QP blog, which has some good stuff on occasion. Apparently there is also a listserve, but at this point I got way too many on the go.

The VR stuff has been interesting, but very much aimed at the Phils of the world. The panel with the MLS students yesterday was the main exception so far.

One interesting thing I saw was a VR software where circ questions can be transferred by chat and circ staff have a seperate queue where they ONLY get circ questions. We get lots of circ type questions, in particular "what's my pin" and it would be better service to be able to refer the patron, who has chosen chat to pose their query, to chat rather then phone to complete their transaction. While Questionpoint isn't really set up to do this with a consortia (I say yet cause one of their people was at the back scribbling notes), individual libraries can set up a simple Meebo IM