I wrote just yesterday that there’s not much digital reference work going on in Europe. Well, I take it back. I saw a post to the Dig_Ref listserv just this morning about the People’s Network Enquiry Service, a pilot chat-based reference service in England, staffed by public librarians. A few points of interest that I’ve gleaned from the service’s site:

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about statewide reference services, so this is an interesting comparison. Bailey-Hainer (2005) suggests that virtual reference is cost-effective only at the statewide scale; it may not work for individual services going it alone. So what about at a nationwide level? I suspect this will be sustainable in the long term. My question is, where between individual library and statewide is the tipping point for sustainability of a virtual reference service? (According to the CIA World Factbook, the UK has a land area slightly smaller than Oregon, but has a population slightly greater than California and Texas combined. So it’s the equivalent of one hell of a densely populated state?) More interesting to me though will be to see if & how their policies morph over time as the service scales up, and what sorts of evaluations they do with all that data they’re collecting. So far the People’s Network has done a very nice job of evaluating the impact of its other programs.