One-Two-Three, Cha Cha...... com???

One-two-three, Cha cha-…..com??? www.Chacha.com , that is.

“Wanted: Night Surfers; Brainiacs; Smarty-Pants; Sports Fans; Good Students; Know-It-Alls; Experts; Info Junkies; Clever Moms; Inquiring Minds; Einsteins; Puzzle Solvers; Newshounds.” Provide your name, areas of interest, level of education, availability, and explain why you would be a good guide, and you might be dancing to the sound of cellular ringtones!

Featured recently on NPR’s On the Media, through chacha.com you get answers from a real person by calling or texting from your cell phone. The piece included a discussion of the reliability of answers received through chacha and the similarities/differences between that and such services as Yahoo Answers. No mention of librarians except toward the end when host Mark Phillips commented on a future Desk Set-like environment (not that Desk Set was mentioned)…. “And maybe it’s better that way. If you’re wondering about a director’s last film, it’s nice sometimes to do a search, get sent to IMDb and see a list of all her films. Each answering service, including the old-fashioned Google Search or, God forbid, a trip to the library, has a time and a place.”

I got to thinking how easy it would be to incorporate texting into reference operations and thought that one of my Illinois colleagues might be doing just that. I was right. Cruising onto the Arlington Memorial Public Library's website, I found a plethora of options for reaching a reference librarian—virtual reference, IM, phone, email, and yes—SMS! Not being a very good texter, I chatted them up instead, and learned that it really was pretty easy to do. Bill P also pointed me to a Library Success webpage providing more info about libraries actually doing this. Thanks, Bill!

I hope that OCLC’s virtual/remote reference service, QuestionPoint, will incorporate SMS into a future release. As a global community of librarians available around the clock, it is the natural, credible alternative to the answer websites.

Should librarians really get into the SMS business? Yes. Sure, texting has its limitations and we cannot use it to answer complicated questions. We can help them as much as possible and then send them to the bricks and mortar library, or a librarian-staffed remote reference service if necessary. That positive interaction will make them more likely to go there. We need library supporters among all generations and communication styles. Texting won’t replace reference as we know it—it is one more aid to place in our toolbox to link our users--and non-users--to the information at their point-of-need.

Above all, we need to get the message out to our users that we are available to them through various media... that a "trip to the library" can be as close as their keyboard....or even cell phone.