 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com IM, e-mail, and chat reference is already here, but have you adapted your traditional reference interview and information provision skills to these new formats? ACRL online trainer and popular Internet workshop leader Diane Kovacs has assembled this handbook to help reference librarians develop the communication skills and resources they need to work effectively in the virtual reference environment. The handbook shows how to adapt traditional face-to-face reference interview skills to the virtual interview and how to interpret and use new cues (chat slang, IM shorthand, emoticons, etc.) to better serve your users. For both chat and e-mail transactions, Kovacs outlines strategies for analyzing the question, conducting the interview, developing a search strategy, and delivering sources. There is guidance for selecting the best information format for users and delivering content in a timely and valuable manner. This practical guide offers everything reference librarians need to move from the face-to-face to virtual transaction with ease. Average Customer Rating:  
Needs Editing!
| Customer Rating: | While this book is short (practically a dollar a page!!), it still would have benefitted from editing -- more accurately some proof-reading. The author is actually an editor who has compiled interviews and various point-of-view reactions to different VR scenarios and situations. The contributor SH, in particular, writes poorly with sentence fragments, incorrect grammar and odd usage (i.e. "in the other hand" instead of "ON the other hand"). While SH is perhaps a non-native English speaker, this is still unacceptable in a text format and was highly distracting and irritating. I was required to purchase this for a graduate level course and this is certainly not graduate level caliber writing. For the price, especially, this felt like a rip-off. PROOF READ!!!
Other than that, this text is OK. It is not a taxing read and offers interesting insight into VR situations and implementation. |
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