RUSA Standards and The Virtual Librarian Service Part IV
And the last of the evaluation of the VLS against the RUSA Standards
5.0 Organization of Service
The Virtual Librarian Service’s primary clientele is the online academic institution with no campus. All faculty, administration and students are online and all service is offered at the beginning by email and all eResources are web-based and all meetings are by videoconferencing or phone. Accreditation guidelines for that educational institution’s online program are met.
From time to time, depending on the client educational institution, we may set up a Virtual Librarian Service where there also exists a campus library or where a campus exists but no library. Therefore in some educational institutions the Virtual Librarian Service may be an extension of an institutions existing reference service, where the Virtual Librarian Service manages the online division, its faculty, administration and students, and the campus library manages the on-campus faculty and students. In those cases, close contact is maintained by attending campus based librarian meetings, training new campus librarians on the virtual library content, sharing finding aids and research guides, budget development for online resources and problem-solving.
6.0 Privacy
Put together, the Virtual Librarian Service librarians are guided by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act FERPA, the American Library Association Library Bill of Rights and the client educational institution’s own accreditation and internal privacy policies. The Library Reference Service Policy acknowledges and outlines privacy rights to the students. It is posted and available as appropriate.
The retention policy is to keep library transactions forever, first as active records and then after a period of time when they are deemed to be no longer necessary for regular use, they are kept as a working archive. Documents created to support the work of the reference service are regularly updated and archived in the client email, with only the most recent version retained.
Melody M. Hainsworth, MLIS, Ph. D.
melody@virtuallibrarianservice.com
and greatly assisted by Virtual Librarian Service LIbrary Consultants Cheri Rauser, Head of Reference Services and Samantha Sinanan, Academic Reference Librarian