It’s not easy being a librarian. And reading this book, The Virtual Reference Desk: Creating a Reference Future, you can’t help but feel that librarians work awfully hard at pleasing their customers for (often) not much reward.

Faced with increased competition from Google, and a generation that expects to have information at its fingertips instantly, convincing users that a librarian’s specialised skills can help to provide more relevant information quickly is quite a challenge.

A ‘virtual reference desk’ is a way of answering users’ reference requests, without the need for a physical reference desk. One model is that the user, sitting at their home computer, logs in to the library system and engages in a live chat session with a real librarian. In another model used in Florida, organisations have video conferencing units that enable users to talk directly to a librarian in the main library’s call centre. The forward-thinkers in the US have also equipped librarians with pocket PCs, wirelessly connected to the central database, enabling staff to wander around the library and ask patrons if they need help.

Judging by the research presented in this book, these innovations have been welcomed by library patrons, though it could be argued that the more librarians provide, the more users demand.

Marie Radford, in her contribution, cites examples of ungrateful users being rude to librarians who, in their opinion, haven’t helped enough in their online chat, while the opening chapter, by Laura Kortz, Sharon Morris and Louise Greene, gives this example of a teenager’s online chat question to a librarian: “Can you help me find the food, clothing, work, beliefs, shelter, recreation and tools for Tanzania?”

It’s encouraging to see that, in the face of such high expectations from users, librarians are maintaining their professionalism and rising to meet the challenge. Virtual reference desks represent an imaginative way of providing a librarian’s services, without the user having to do much more than switch on their computer. But a bit more gratitude would go a long way.