Pandemic Chat: A Comparison of Pandemic-Era and Pre-Pandemic Online Chat Questions at the University of Mississippi Libraries

Abstract

This paper analyzes two datasets of virtual reference interactions via a library chat service at the University of Mississippi: one from the COVID-19 pandemic period 2020-2022, and another from the pre-pandemic period of 2017–2019. By comparing the chats’ length, distribution across days, weeks, and months, as well as word frequency analysis, it concludes that the pre-pandemic and pandemic chats appear to be fundamentally similar aside from a 16% drop in chat usage between the period from 2017–19 to the period from 2020–22.

Keywords:

• academic libraries
• chat
• chat references
• comparison
• COVID-19
• textual analysis
• virtual reference