Virtual Reference Project

Last night Kecia Hopper and I did our virtual reference project, role playing as virtual librarians. I came into this project thinking this would be easier than it ended up being. One of the problems we ran into was caused by the virtual world itself because it began kicking us out of the chat sessions. This caused timely delays that would have been irritating in a "real world" setting. Another problem was finding the correct information in the Information Gardens to answer the questions. This being our first time role playing it was hard to find the correct object to click on to access the information. I am sure that as we use it more we will become more comfortable in the gardens. It was a fun project and really gave in site to one of the tasks we will be doing as a reference librarians. I enjoyed learning about the gardens more in depth and was really surprised at the mass quantity information available. The main source I used to answer Kecia's questions was the library's online catalog to find books related to her questions. The question that stumped me the most was; Where do I find a guide to APA citation style? I could not locate the right object to click to get the information. Other than that question I think everything went well. I should have used more probing questions to find out more about what Kecia was looking for and I will have to work on that. It can be confusing on a virtual chat with long periods of silence, because of this we had to keep asking each other if we were still connected. Especially with the glitches we were having with the virtual that I mentioned earlier. I have to say that in all everything went well as could be expected and next time we will know more of what not to do.