The Role of Synchronous Virtual Reference in Teaching and Learning: A Grounded Theory Analysis of Instant Messaging Transcripts

Passonneau, Sarah; Coffey, Dan

doi:10.5860/crl-102rl

Cited by 14 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Evaluation research: How well does it happen?" 15 This project undertook quantitative descriptions of how things are being used. By looking at what they were asking, and the implied classes, this was a form of contextual and diagnostic research.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lifting the Veil: Analyzing Collaborative Virtual Reference Transcripts to Demonstrate Value and Make Recommendations for Practice

Brown¹

2017

RUSQ

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Extended transcript analysis was used to analyze how our chat reference was being used and make recommendations for practice. Because this analysis was longitudinal (over a year, or at least several months) significant patterns were documented. Several themes were noted that emphasized the unique characteristics of the Community College population. The project documented that chat reference patrons are persistent. The questions that came up about assessing the service underlined the commonalities between virtual and face to face reference.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lifting the Veil: Analyzing Collaborative Virtual Reference Transcripts to Demonstrate Value and Make Recommendations for Practice

Brown¹

2017

RUSQ

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“…8 Coding-based content analysis with or without predefined categories is one type of qualitative method. 9 The other type of qualitative research method is conversation or language usage analysis but it is not a dominant type of research method, as compared to coding-based qualitative content analysis. 10 The most common quantitative methods are simple descriptive count-or frequencybased analyses that are accompanied by qualitative coding-based content analyses.…”

Section: Chat Transcript Analysis Methods In Library Settingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Topic Modeling as a Tool for Analyzing Library Chat Transcripts

Koh

Fienup

2021

ITAL

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Library chat services are an increasingly important communication channel to connect patrons to library resources and services. Analysis of chat transcripts could provide librarians with insights into improving services. Unfortunately, chat transcripts consist of unstructured text data, making it impractical for librarians to go beyond simple quantitative analysis (e.g., chat duration, message count, word frequencies) with existing tools. As a stepping-stone toward a more sophisticated chat transcript analysis tool, this study investigated the application of different types of topic modeling techniques to analyze one academic library’s chat reference data collected from April 10, 2015, to May 31, 2019, with the goal of extracting the most accurate and easily interpretable topics. In this study, topic accuracy and interpretability—the quality of topic outcomes—were quantitatively measured with topic coherence metrics. Additionally, qualitative accuracy and interpretability were measured by the librarian author of this paper depending on the subjective judgment on whether topics are aligned with frequently asked questions or easily inferable themes in academic library contexts. This study found that from a human’s qualitative evaluation, Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (pLSA) produced more accurate and interpretable topics, which is not necessarily aligned with the findings of the quantitative evaluation with all three types of topic coherence metrics. Interestingly, the commonly used technique Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) did not necessarily perform better than pLSA. Also, semi-supervised techniques with human-curated anchor words of Correlation Explanation (CorEx) or guided LDA (GuidedLDA) did not necessarily perform better than an unsupervised technique of Dirichlet Multinomial Mixture (DMM). Last, the study found that using the entire transcript, including both sides of the interaction between the library patron and the librarian, performed better than using only the initial question asked by the library patron across different techniques in increasing the quality of topic outcomes.

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“…A review of the literature on chat reference from 1995-2010 found 59 studies that focused on the parameters of the service (which clients were served and what questions they asked), the administration of the service (how questions were answered), staffing and training, and the purpose and objectives of the service (Matteson, Salamon, & Brewster, 2011). Since 2010, interest in the teaching potential for library chat has grown (Passonneau & Coffey, 2011;Dempsey, 2016;Dempsey, 2017), as has analysis of communication styles and problems (Radford, Connaway, & DeAngelis, 2011;Koshik & Okazawa, 2012;Owens, 2013).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Origin of Queries: Where Chat Reference Questions Begin

Dempsey¹,

Warner

Lux

et al. 2022

Internet Reference Services Quarterly

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Academic libraries providing chat reference services have a range of options for where and how library users can engage with chat providers. These entry points can be static or proactively invite users into the service. The study compares the URLs from which users entered chat reference at three large public research libraries the United States. The URLs show where users were when they sought assistance with library tasks. This exploratory investigation is important for extending knowledge of user help-seeking behavior and how chat service configuration may impact use. Data are variables related to chat interactions (n=19,839

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The Role of Synchronous Virtual Reference in Teaching and Learning: A Grounded Theory Analysis of Instant Messaging Transcripts

Cited by 14 publications

References 15 publications

Lifting the Veil: Analyzing Collaborative Virtual Reference Transcripts to Demonstrate Value and Make Recommendations for Practice

Lifting the Veil: Analyzing Collaborative Virtual Reference Transcripts to Demonstrate Value and Make Recommendations for Practice

Topic Modeling as a Tool for Analyzing Library Chat Transcripts

On the Origin of Queries: Where Chat Reference Questions Begin

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