i'm not familiar with your institution but i have been thinking for quite a while of the importance of policies and procedures in terms of virtual services. i work in an academic library which is part of a state university system. we have certain services (and policies) accorded by the university system and will in future be increasingly working as a group in certain areas to take advantage of the economics and specialized areas available through the system as a whole.

Some of the foundation includes planning with:

1. Users: determine types of users and do surveys of user needs and literature reviews

2. Access: policies of access in terms of your organization and associate groups and guests

3. Uses: How the services will be used AND assessed (big data…)

4. Discovery: marketing of services and user education (including information literacy)

5. Future: potential changes in technology, users, funding, and the organization which will affect services and how they will be managed and delivered. For example, how will conglomeration of particular units change services?

6. Policies: formulate policies appropriate to organizational mission dealing with responsibilities, above categories, funding etcetera.

I agreed with Ms. Nemajovsk. The academic library offers a lot of virtual services long time ago. I don't know the reason that some professors are so distant from the librarians. I enjoy a lot to work with academics who demand services in any format in a collaborative manner. One good example of virtual services are the development of repositories in the academia. The librarians plays an important role in this offering.

We have both a physical library (with a dwindling collection of hard copy resources) - and a large amount of electronic resources. We have seen a big shift in moving from primarily lending books and journals to educating clinical staff and medical students on how to use the medical databases for their research and the extensive online collection. It is a much more value added (and interesting) role for us as librarians, and more focussed on education and research collaboration. Rather than simply reflecting a building where people dropped in to borrow books, we are now approached as professionals online, by phone and face to face to help people find their way around the enormous number of resources "in the cloud". Our experience is that our professional services as librarians are needed more than ever, and that is very much reflected in our stats around database searching tutorials, collaboration in systematic reviews, Endnote tutorials, presentations and a huge variety of research consultations. I think the virtual library is actually a fantastic thing - but I can also see that clients very much value the opportunity to meet face to face for support and collaborative purposes, so we do actually need a physical space too.

Hi Helen, I agree virtual is a difficult word to use because of its associations with technology. I agree that f2f, or any form of communication is good. My point is that we need to reverse the service flow. In the Virtual Library and Knowledge Service we start by assuming that we go to the users, where ever they are. BW Matt

Of course we go to the users - wherever they are. Connections with our library increased exponentially once I started an outreach type role where I went to other department meetings and joined a research group. I also maintain regular contact with a large special interest group with fortnightly email bulletins. They are almost always met with an immediate response in emailed requests for assistance, tutes and consultations. The difference in going out to clients, rather than waiting for them to contact us, has been phenomenal.

Great response Helen. In my university, the reference librarian/personal librarian is not chained to the reference desk. We meet our clients where it is convenient for them. We attend departmental meetings to keep them abreast of recent advances or changes in our collections, we collaborate with them to teach students how to access and use library resources, we do a lot of outreach to faculty and students through emails, phone calls, embedded in research groups etc. The advantage of having electronic collection is the anytime anywhere access 24/7 from their places of comfort but that does not mean any diminished role for librarians but instead more opportunities to collaborate and share expert knowledge in knowledge/information management. We have issues of space for retention of books hence regular weeding and off campus storage facilities with fast retrieval processes in place.

I agree, Innocent. The 24/7 online access to resources is brilliant and absolutely provides more opportunities to collaborate. More than ever our clients are seeing us as experts who can help them to make sense of the enormous amount of material they have access to. We teach them to find relevant results, access the full text, export to bibliographic managers and then cite them in their finished piece of work. Basically we are teaching them to tame the data available and use it in their work in a way that makes them feel they are controlling the resources and not vice versa! It is really rewarding to see their attitudes change as they feel more confident and realise how much time they will save.

Currently, I teach a course entitled "Digital Library" in undergraduate degree in librarianship. And that is exactly what I have guided lessons: focus on how librarians build and improve services in the virtual context. There are two models that I have used in class who have demonstrated student interest: DELOS and 5S. In these perspectives, the library instance of conversation and knowledge is supported by a team of librarians as curators of content and information managers.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, the shift is starting to occurred. For specialized libraries the situation of relying more in the physical is becoming less and less sustainable. Concepts like the embedded librarians, users, information services seem to be the key words that modern and proactive librarians are endorsing.

There is always time to think about substance (services) and form (technology). Both aspects represent two lungs of our academic life. If we misregard one them, there would be lack of oxigen. In terms of services, I can tell you my experience about using a tool I created called Lingstorm (Linguistic Storm) for Information Rertrieval, which is a matrix of controlled vocabulary of 27 possible combinations. The results allow users to retrieve pertinent information from Commercial Academic Information Systems (CAIS) from Elsevier, Ebsco, Proquest, and the like. In this way users may be updated at an international level to warrant the handling of the emerging science trends, to publish their findings in indexed traditional or open access journals, to high-rank their schools as a result of publishing productivity and to assure their school grants. However, to achieve these goals, young researchers must face three barriers: chaotic interfaces of the CAIS and severe limitations of linguistic help; English language appropriate management and absence of controlled vocabulary awareness. The benefits among others are users (mainly young researchers), may get get earlier to RESEARCH MATURITY; MASTER trends, processes of international research, LEAD to be in the fittest environment for their purposes, and REINVIGORATE the research duties as stimulating ability rather than a heavy task, BUILD UP linguistic strategies based on the native speakers languages. After all, knowledge is not originated in a specific language. Lingstorm gives a useful meaning to IR, and this may be a service where librarians, users, and technology can get along together in getting the best from money, services and talent. This is part of a paper I will present in Turkey, next tuesday, may 27. I will be glad in sharing the paper in Research Gate as soon as possible, and I certainbly will be open to answer some possible questions you may have.

What is CAIS, professor? We will very glad to read your paper. ! Congratulations!

Hi Cádiz, CAIS stands for Commercial Academic Information Systems, as stated on line 7 of the post. I thank your kind comment and I surely will love to exchange our valuable points of view and experience concerning our aims: Serve our Users.

My institution is a 4 year college with mostly 1st and 2nd (many majors) year undergraduates and a small but growing number of 3rd and 4th years (nursing only) with a large online presence for both students and faculty. Currently for virtual services, we maintain various supports ranging from library webpages, including an orientation site with various links, guides, and information. Our basic webpages are supplemented by LibGuides with more of a question and answer style and embedded and linked videos to promote research skills for our particular library resources (mostly camtasia based). To round this out we offer “Ask A Librarian” with email and text. I also embed in a nursing class online (at the request of the professor) and maintain a nursing specific LibGuide. All librarians are involved in institution-wide committees. As we grow I see the need for more planning with services to include officially liaising with departments-rather than the current rather the casual efforts we make in expounding on our services in limited professional development, committee work, and networking. We get some “word of mouth” business through my assisting faculty working on their own research and then explaining the extra supports we have in place.

As Rafael discussed, linguistics is important-even for those with English as a first language. As part of f2f (face to face) and virtual (including my camtasia videos) I include for my level of students-especially starting out- the concept of “playing with words” and the difference changing 1 word in a search phrase makes in the results of a database search.

To Cadiz Lourdes, Caryl Nemajovsky and all those colleagues interested in this topic, I have posted my paper in ResearchGate presented in Turkey. It was welcome and I am glad to share a small but substantial contribution. I am totally open to questions or suggestions to enrich my work.

We have to design the evidence around the users' activity, integrating it wherever possible. But, sorry Matt, I don't have any great ideas on how to do that. If you can embed a point-of-care tool in the electronic health record, as is now happening in some places, then that would be a good start. I agree though - the virtual library will have to splinter and go to its users instead of existing as a separate complete entity. This probably applies to the virtual librarian too!

I work in a virtual academic medical library, with a small print collection, a Reading Room and a large electronic collection. At first I found it challenging to work in this environment. However, one can research and theorize forever, at the end of the day, as librarians we do the same things in a virtual setting as in a more traditional setting: reach out to our patrons and integrate our services into the institution's clinical, academic and research programs. We have an effective liaison program, which has proven to be an excellent platform for relationship building. We teach a lot of workshops and collaborate with faculty not only on the content of our workshops, but also on publications and projects. Embedding librarians is the next logical step. I believe Johns Hopkins' Welch Library has done that. So far, we have not been able to do that, mostly due to lack of space. The virtual library model is not such a great mystery, but you have to make it work for you. Do what is most effective in your particular setting.