Background

The University of Western Sydney (UWS) is the ninth-largest university in Australia, with over 35,000 students, including some 5000 international students. Its six campuses, served by seven libraries, are responsible for students over an area of 9000 km2, a footprint roughly the size of the Netherlands. A large proportion of UWS students study through off-campus and offshore multimodal delivery. ‘Two thirds of our domestic students live in the region, which has a population of 1.8 million and the third largest economy in Australia’ (Pavincich, 2007, 1).

The UWS library is committed to ensuring that it provides an equitable approach to all services across all campuses, and all modes of study. The challenge of providing high-quality client services to such geographically dispersed and disparate groups of academics and students has been in part met through a service we call Information Central, which is a single receipt and response point for all incoming queries (telephone, online and e-mail). Information Central is staffed by a small team throughout the library's extensive opening hours, including evenings and weekends.

Previous remote client services

Prior to 2006, the library ran an e-mail enquiry service (Contact Us) and virtual reference service (Online Librarian), operating as adjuncts to an individual library's desk and phone services. Contact Us, although popular, suffered from a lack of consistency of responses and the 24-hour turnaround key performance indicator (KPI) was not always met, particularly on weekends and evenings. While the more traditional universities were cancelling their virtual chat subscriptions due to poor use, ours was flourishing, although once again consistency of responses was an issue, and the service operated for very limited hours. All queries to the service desks were received and responded to at a campus level. A complex faceto- face reference query could be interrupted at any time by a phone enquiry involving a loans dispute, resulting in interruption of service for all parties concerned. An integrated approach to service delivery was clearly required. Kortz, Morris and Greene (2006) assert that from a client perspective it is good practice to have a number of access options available, such as face-to-face, live chat, e-mail and phone, and integrate them in a meaningful way so that the client can choose the method most comfortable and useful to them.