Library & Information Science Research

25 (2003) 225–231

Reviews

LISR considers for review reference works, periodicals, dissertations, research methods

texts, computer software, and professional literature concerning the research process and

applications of research. Views expressed are those of the reviewers and do not necessarily

reflect views of the Board of Editors or publisher. Anyone wishing to write reviews or suggest

titles should contact Marilyn Domas White, LISR Review Editor, College of Information

Studies, University of Maryland, Hornbake Library, South Wing, 4117F, College Park, MD

20742 <whitemd@wam.umd.edu >. Publishers and authors, likewise, are requested to forward

announcements or copies of new or forthcoming titles that may interest LISR readers.

Digital Reference. Special issue of D-Lib Magazine

by Joanne Silverstein (Issue Ed.); Bonita Wilson (Ed.). D-Lib Magazine, 9(2), 2003.

Available at http://www.dlib.org/. ISSN 1082-9873.

D-Lib Magazine’s special issue on digital reference seeks to present some of the issues

involved in incorporating human experts into automated systems to answer users’ questions.

Its aim is to encourage not just digital service providers, but everyone who organizes digital

collections and designs interfaces, to ‘‘consider these and related issues, enter the dialog, and

contribute to the theory and practice of digital reference.’’ This special issue follows in the

tradition of other journal issues devoted to digital reference (Digital reference services, 2000;

Curry, 2001) and digital library services (Peters, 2000).

The collection of articles presented here is diverse enough that every reader should be able

to find something of interest. Topics range from an overview of digital reference services for

K-12 education, to evaluating the quality of chat reference service, to the use of digital

reference models in providing access to image collections. With the exception of Abby

Goodrum’s piece on image intermediation, all of the papers are based on presentations given

at the 4th Annual Virtual Reference Desk (VRD) Conference in November, 2002. David

Lankes and Joseph Janes also appear to have given related presentations at the Digital

Reference Research Symposium in August, 2002.

Even for those who were able to attend these events, it is useful to have access to these

detailed write-ups from such a distinguished group of authors. The list of contributors reads

like a who’s who of digital reference. It includes David Lankes, co-founder of AskERIC and

the Virtual Reference Desk, and two of his colleagues at the Information Institute of Syracuse

(Joanne Silverstein and Abby Goodrum); Joseph Janes, founding director of the Internet

Public Library, American Libraries’ ‘‘Internet Librarian,’’ and assistant professor at the

University of Washington’s Information School; Jeffrey Penka, Manager of Cooperative

0740-8188/03/$ – see front matter D 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Reviews / Library & Information Science Research 25 (2003) 225–231226

Reference Services and the QuestionPoint service at OCLC; and Marilyn Domas White and

Eileen Abels, well-established researchers in digital reference, along with their colleague,

Neal Kaske, at the University of Maryland.

The issue is organized in D-Lib’s usual easy-to-navigate format, which provides links to

articles from a clean table of contents, appropriate hyperlinks to references and author

information from within articles, and graphics that are legible even on the computer screen.

Silverstein’s introduction sets the tone, providing the reader with a broad definition of digital

reference as ‘‘a network of expertise, human intermediation and resources placed at the

disposal of users in an online environment.’’ She states that, despite increasingly sophisticated

automated systems, users will sometimes need human guidance, particularly for difficult

questions. Various issues arising from this reality are examined in the articles that follow.

Lankes gives a good sense of the breadth and depth of digital reference services aimed at

primary and secondary students and educators. He profiles two different types of services

(library reference and AskA services), then describes the users and types of questions

presented to two well-known ‘‘exemplar’’ services aimed primarily at the K-12 world, one

from each category (KidsConnect and AskERIC). He discusses briefly the use of question and

answer sets in evaluating topics of interest in education, patterns of question asking, language

use, and so forth, but does not address the legal and ethical questions involved in using this

kind of data. Lankes argues that the ‘‘rich, well-documented tradition’’ of digital reference for

education can provide insights for the broader digital reference domain; indeed, it already has.

In ‘‘The Technological Challenges of Digital Reference,’’ Penka quickly summarizes how

digital reference technology has changed over the past two decades and describes the

capabilities of three of the main providers of digital reference technology: QuestionPoint,

LSSI, and 24/7 Reference. He then surveys the social landscape of digital reference,

including patron needs (Who are the users? Where are they? What technology and bandwidth

do they have access to?) and issues of interest to librarians (workflow, cooperation,

interoperability, and service quality). Interestingly, he does not mention the cost of providing

digital reference—an issue for many smaller libraries— and overlooks issues related to

sharing patrons’ questions and monitoring librarians’ responses. The article ends with an

examination of how the Library of Congress assessed patron needs to enhance their digital

reference service. Penka provides a rather uncritical view of QuestionPoint; however, there is

no denying the importance of the QuestionPoint initiative, and he provides an insider’s

perspective on its development and implementation at the Library of Congress.

Janes’ and Silverstein’s article on question negotiation and the technological environment

focuses more on the range and scope of digital reference services and question management

software, than on question negotiation per se. In the first part of this article, the authors

describe how e-mail forms and chat pages solicit limited information that might help the

librarian refine user queries; they also summarize librarian impressions, posted to the

DIGREF listserv in 2001, on how the reference interview is affected by the medium in

which it occurs. They then list some of the emergent issues in digital reference service and

give four examples of how technology can ‘‘augment the digital reference professional’s

capabilities in question negotiation.’’ These examples [QuestionPoint, MULDER (Kwok,

Etzioni, and Welds, 2001), QABuilder, and the National Science Digital Library] seem to

Reviews / Library & Information Science Research 25 (2003) 225–231 227

illustrate how technology can help route, manage, and archive questions, rather than how it

can help librarians negotiate complex questions.

White, Abels, and Kaske address the issue of question negotiation a bit more directly.

Their straightforward report describes the careful development, data collection procedures,

and preliminary findings from a small pilot study designed to evaluate the quality of chat

reference services. Most intriguing is the finding that answer accuracy for chat reference

interactions may actually be higher than it is for face-to-face interactions. The full study

promises to provide valuable information on the quality of answers, effectiveness and

efficiency, and the process of question negotiation in chat reference interactions.

In the final article in this special issue, Goodrum describes her incipient efforts ‘‘to extend

the VRD digital reference model to the digital museum community.’’ In doing so, she offers

a good example of how previous research in digital reference can be applied to new

realms— in this case, the area of image retrieval. Her article provides a nice ending note to

an issue devoted to inspiring all of those who work with digital information to consider the

issues and ‘‘enter the dialog,’’ as Silverstein urges in the introduction.

Overall, this collection of papers provides a useful sampling of some of the current issues

and research going on in digital reference by some of the key players in the field.

References

Annual Virtual Reference Desk Conference, November 2002. Retrieved March 14, 2003, from http://www.vrd.org/

conferences/VRD2002/proceedings.

AskERIC. Retrieved March 14, 2003, from http://www.askeric.org.

Curry, E. L. (2003). Technological advances in reference: A paradigm shift? Library Trends 50, 165–305.

Digital Reference Services. (1993). Papers based on the Virtual Reference Desk Conference. Reference and User

Services Quarterly, 39, 352–390.

KidsConnect. Retrieved March 14, 2003, from http://www.ala.org/ICONN/kidsconn.html.

Kwok, C., Etzioni, O., & Weld, D. S. (2001). Scaling question answering to the Web. ACM Transactions on

Information Systems, 19, 242–262.

National Science Digital Library. Retrieved March 14, 2003, from http://nsdl.org/render.userLayoutRootNode.uP.

Peters, T. A. (2000). Assessing digital library services. Library Trends, 49, 221–390.

QABuilder. QABuilder software features. Retrieved March 14, 2003, from http://www.vrd.org/incubator_

flyer.pdf.

QuestionPoint. Retrieved March 14, 2003, from http://www.questionpoint.org.

Virtual Reference Desk Symposium, Cambridge, MA, August 1–3, 2002. Retrieved March 14, 2003, from

http://quartz.syr.edu/symposium.

Charlotte Ford

Birmingham-Southern College Library

900 Arkadelphia Rd.

Birmingham, AL 35254, USA

E-mail address: cford@bsc.edu

doi:10.1016/S0740-8188(03)00027-6