sound advice

I stumbled across this blog entry from LBR, which is a virtual reference blog. it looks like there's been some back and forth between him and a few other bloggers, but what it really comes down to is using common sense in assuming that patrons are already pretty saavy, but you have to do a whole reference interview anyway. Retreiving articles from liscenced sources was a point of contention for the thread, but if our IM reference questions are coming from DU students, there's not much of a conflict as there would have been if we were still using AskColorado.

A related thought.
In Joseph Janes' book, Introduction to Reference Work in the Digital Age, there was a lot of to-do about "evaporating patrons" (139) in email and IM. Like everything else it seems to come down to comfort with email and IM etiquette. Which is the same as etiquette in general.

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