Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Shall We Chat? A Statistical Case Study Of Chat Reference Utilization, Jiebei Luo

Library

Purpose
This paper aims to evaluate the performance of a chat reference service implemented at an academic library in a private liberal arts college by gauging its impact on other forms of reference service in terms of usage volume, with a focus on research-related face-to-face reference questions.
Design/methodology/approach
Two statistical methods are used, namely, the difference-in-differences method and a simple moving average time series analysis, to analyze both the short-term and long-term impact brought by chat reference.
Findings
This study finds that the usage volume of the traditional face-to-face reference is significantly affected by chat reference in its first service …