Approaching our patrons: From passive to active virtual reference
Xiangming Mu
ASIS&T Annual Meeting - 2006 (ASIS&T 2006)
Austin, Texas, November 3-9, 2006
Abstract
Targeting the goal of increasing virtual reference (VR) usage, a novel interactive virtual reference (iVR) model is proposed. In contrast to the traditional passive one-way model, iVR encourages active VR service by dynamically watching patrons’ information-seeking behaviors using the VR assistant. A prototype iVR system with one dimension VR assistant triggering metric was designed as a research platform based on the iVR model. A pilot user study was conducted and the initial results indicated that users did not reject the active VR services in general and this warranted us to continue our exploration.