I just finished my first conversation with a reference staff member at Drexel via IM! I needed to find a required journal and was thrown off by the interface they provided me with. I went right to my comfort zone – InfoTrac because that’s what we have at work and I know how to use it – but turns out that even though it said my journal was in there – it wasn’t! So I opened up IM and asked the librarian. Now that I think back I guess a complaint would be that he/she didn’t provide a name so I can’t tell you who helped me – for now we’re going to assume it was a “she” – based on statistics.
Anyway, she walked me through each step in the process and when I hit a bump she came up with a way to help me. She also introduced me to ProQuest which is way prettier than InfoTrac! I found both of my journal articles and am ready to sit down and do some reading.
IM Reference is totally handy!! I love it!
[...] Micheal Stephens quotes approvingly from Nicole Engard’s description of her IM reference transaction with her university’s reference staff. “Use this post as evidence for the discussions at your library about IM reference. ”, says Micheal. Angel, at the Gypsy Librarian has some thoughtful (unrelated) comments on the same topic, noting that IM reference doesn’t seem to be working at his institution, perhaps because the students don’t use IM much in their normal lives. [...]