Many libraries who chat virtually with patrons have documents specifying how to conduct high quality chat transactions, but those documents can be hard to find, contain sparse instructions, or are glossed over during training. This can make it hard for individual librarians to refresh themselves on key service points and to train new chat librarians. Our lightning talk will share actions taken by Oregon’s Answerland chat service to improve documentation for best practices in quality chat reference.

In 2017/18, Answerland’s Quality Team decided that to help librarians chatting across Oregon improve their chat skills, it was imperative to clarify, flesh out, and improve access to Best Practices documents. The Quality Team decided to create one document to act as the go-to reference point for Best Practices. First created as a PDF, this will be rolled out as part of the Answerland Staff Toolkit libguide in January 2019. We’ve improved navigation, added more details and examples, and included a wider range of situational tips, such as how to avoid microaggressions while chatting. To share this with the wider community, the Best Practices Document has been given a creative commons license. We hope sharing our efforts will inspire other organizations to improve their best practices and give the community ideas to better organize their training documents.