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Return on Investment: Is Virtual Reference Worth the Cost?

Susan C. Whitmore, Deputy Director, NIH Library, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD.

Results: The expense of providing a virtual reference service was determined not to be cost effective. The cost of answering a question using the service was found to be several times that of answering a question at the information desk. During the 4 years that the service was in use the number of questions received rose from an average of 40 per month to an average of 100 per month during the last 2 years but did not continue to rise. During the same period, questions received at the information desk declined but still remained about 10 times as high as those received by virtual reference. While user satisfaction surveys of the virtual reference service revealed that customers were satisfied with the service (average rating 4.4 out of 5), a user needs survey conducted in 2005 revealed that customers preferred to ask questions (44.5%) and request literature searches (34.2%) via email rather than other means. Finally, there were recurring technological problems that inconvenienced customers, and a planned change in the vendor’s software that would inhibit the ability of the librarian and the customer to cobrowse proprietary Web pages removed what had originally been one of the selling points of the software.
Conclusions: Given the need to have staff who have time to pursue new strategic objectives and the higher cost/low benefit of the service, the virtual reference service was discontinued.