Analyzing Chat Transcripts to Improve Interlibrary Loan Services

The Pennsylvania State University Libraries use Springshare’s Ask a Librarian service to provide virtual reference assistance to users. In 2014, the Libraries added a LibChat widget that allowed users to connect directly to the Interlibrary Loan team through connection points embedded on the Interlibrary Loan webpages and ILLiad interface. In this paper, chat and email tickets from the Interlibrary Loan channel were analyzed to identify and address common issues that patrons experienced when using the Interlibrary Loan service. We later used information gathered from this data, along with feedback from staff, to make changes to our services, and to information presented on our website.