Extending the Live Chat Reference Service at the University of Turin – A Case Study

This paper aims at describing the feasibility study and verification of the minimum requirements which are needed to extend to the Library of Psychology the online reference support that the University of Turin Digital Library Department managed by Franco Bungaro offers its users. The methodology adopted for this task derives from that developed in a previous project which aimed at improving the communication with library users. This goal was accomplished by means of the automatic analysis of the exchanges between the Library Service patrons and the librarians who provided live chat support from 2014 to 2016. The approach that has been adopted to carry out our reference-related projects derives from a particular Academic research field called “digital humanities”, which represents the intersection between information technologies and humanity studies. Therefore, in order to produce feasible data which could be used to carry out quantitative and qualitative analysis, an automatic processing algorithm was developed. Both the methodology adopted and the results obtained substantiate the need to extend our online reference service to specific libraries to improve the quality of our work.