Agents at the reference desk : Serving information needs and constructing knowledge for wide communities of users

This paper describes an approach to create a collaborative environment that enables the collaborative construction of knowledge. We propose a framework that extends the services traditionally provided by a reference desk at a library by introducing the notion of reference agents that help users in the process of finding information units in vast repositories. We describe an existing virtual reference environment (termed VRef, developed in the context of a mixed physical/digital library) and its extensions to include reference agents. In the extended framework, users post information requests, so reference librarians, other users and reference agents may participate in finding information units in the physical and digital repositories and offer suggestions accordingly. As a result of this process, knowledge is constructed, stored and implicitly maintained by all participants, both human and automated, and can be reused when addressing new requests. Agents use similarity measures from the field of Information Retrieval to detect potentially useful documents. The resulting knowledge base is constantly enriched and refined. We discuss the design and prototypical implementation of the extended framework as well as the results of various preliminary tests.