Users willingly chat online at length with librarians when they need help

What is it about?

In 2003, providing an online chat service for library users to communicate with librarians when they needed help was still fairly new. Many librarians were claiming that library users would not respond well to questions that a librarian would typically ask in an in-person setting - it was believed that the library user wouldn't have the patience and that the librarian simply couldn't do much to help. The authors had access to chat transcripts of the service being provided by librarians at Carnegie Mellon University and looked at anonymized transcripts for how librarians posed questions and how the library users, in general, responded. In short, evidence showed that librarians at Carnegie Mellon University should engage fully because library users were very willing to interact with them at length.

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Why is it important?

The work was important because it was the beginning of evidence that showed that a chat tool could be used for more than short-answer, factual questions. This was good because, as Joe Janes of the University of Washington aptly pointed out, Google had already conquered short-answer, factual questions.