Staffing the Reference Desk in the Largely-Digital Library

Summary

This article examines how a centralized, networked reference service might improve efficiency and reduce costs by addressing two long-standing and seemingly intractable problems associated with the reference process-that librarians spend only a small portion of their time at the reference desk actually answering questions, and that many of the questions they do answer could be handled by paraprofessionals. The authors explore the feasibility of a live, centralized, networked reference service in a library setting by comparing traditional reference services at the County of Los Angeles Public Library with a commercial inbound call center designed to handle the same volume of questions. Applying Erlang C, the standard algorithm used to calculate staffing requirements for commercial call centers, the authors find that a networked reference service based on a call center model could reduce the reference staff requirements at the County of Los Angeles Public Library by 42% or more. These results are very preliminary, and the article cautions against jumping to conclusions until we have much better data on the questions we are answering and the reference process as a whole, but the evidence we do have suggests that networked reference services have the potential to truly revolutionize the way we have been doing reference for the past 100 years.