Expanding and Improving Our Library’s Virtual Chat Service: Discovering Best Practices when Demand Increases ARTICLE Expanding and Improving Our Library’s Virtual Chat Service Discovering Best Practices when Demand Increases Parker Fruehan and Diana Hellyar INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND LIBRARIES | SEPTEMBER 2021 https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v40i3.13117 Parker Fruehan (fruehanp1@southernct.edu) is Assistant Librarian, Hilton C. Buley Library, Southern Connecticut State University. Diana Hellyar (hellyard1@southernct.edu) is Assistant Librarian, Hilton C. Buley Library, Southern Connecticut State University. © 2021. ABSTRACT With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing shutdown of the library building for several months, there was a sudden need to adjust how the Hilton C. Buley Library at Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) delivered its services. Overnight, the library’s virtual chat service went from a convenient way to reach a librarian to the primary method by which library patrons contacted the library for help. In this article, the authors will discuss what was learned during this time and how the service has been adjusted to meet user needs. Best practices and future improvements will be discussed. BACKGROUND The Buley Library started using Springshare's LibChat service in January 2015. The chat service was accessible as a button in the header of all the library webpages, and the wording would change depending on the availability of a librarian. At Buley Library, the chat service is only staffed by our faculty librarians. There were other chat buttons on various individual LibGuides for either specific librarians or for the general library chat. Chat was monitored at the Research & Information Desk by the librarian on duty. The first librarian of the day would log into the shared chat account on the reference desk computer. While each librarian had their own account, using a shared account meant that the librarians could easily hand off a chat interaction during a shift change. While the reference desk was typically busy, librarians would only receive a small number of chats per day. Between 2015 and 2019, the library saw an average of 250 chats per year. Due to the low usage, there was little focus on LibChat training for librarians. For more complicated questions, librarians would often recommend that chat users call, email, or schedule an in-person appointment. Since LibChat was only monitored while librarians were at the reference desk, it was easy to let it become a secondary mode of reference interaction, particularly if there was a surge of in-person reference questions at any given time. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the library quickly shifted from mostly in-person to solely online services. Suddenly, LibChat was the virtual reference desk and the main mode of patron interaction. Despite this change in how the library interacted with the campus, there was only a slight increase in chat usage in the first two months of the closure. In April 2020, we started to explore our options with LibChat in the hopes of increasing visibility and usage. mailto:fruehanp1@southernct.edu mailto:hellyard1@southernct.edu INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND LIBRARIES SEPTEMBER 2021 EXPANDING AND IMPROVING OUR LIBRARY’S VIRTUAL CHAT SERVICE | FRUEHAN AND HELLYAR 2 EVALUATING CHAT WIDGET OPTIONS Considering Technical Implementation The publicly accessible chat interface is made available completely within a webpage, requiring no clients, external applications, or plugins to make it functional. Springshare calls this component the LibChat widget, and provides a prepackaged set of website code necessary to create the chat interface. Within the LibChat system there are a few options for widget placement and presentation. At the time of writing, Springshare offers four widget types in its LibChat product: in-page chat, button pop-out, slide-out tab, and floating.1 When the service is offline, the system replaces the chat interface with a link to library FAQs and the option to submit a question for follow-up. At Buley Library, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown, the button pop-out was the main widget type used to enter a chat session (see fig. 1). Figure 1. Previous library website header with chat pop-out button in upper right-hand corner. The pop-out button works by opening a separate pop-up window with the chat interface. This allows the user to navigate to other pages in the previous window without disconnecting from the session. One challenge to the pop-up window method is that many web browsers block pop-up windows by default, requiring a user to recognize and override this setting. Another option used mainly on librarian profiles and subject guides is the in-page chat, which embeds the chat interface directly on an existing webpage. Many times, these chat widgets are connected to a particular user rather than the queue monitored by all librarians. The user will interact with the chat operator in this dedicated section of the webpage. If a user navigates to a different page in the same window or tab it will disconnect from the chat session. These widget options are easiest when considering web design expertise and time commitment involved in implementation. Both the button pop-out and in-page chat can be accomplished with a user having access to a What You See Is What You Get, or WYSIYG, editor on the webpage and the ability to copy and paste a few lines of HTML code. It does not require any custom