Merger of 24/7 Reference and OCLC

Aaargh...hmmm...what can I say? Great news for 24/7 Reference, great news for OCLC, too. The two are merging. What does that mean for us and the grant. Well, the buzz had been traveling around for quite a while and it was finally confirmed in many of the news reports.

We'll have to wait this one out, but I can say with some certainty that if they take the best of 24/7 Reference (live chat) and Questionpoint (email reference) the end result will be not all that bad.

Again, the reason for selecting 24/7 Reference was to be a part of the cooperative--we don't have the staffing to operate the service 24 hours per day by ourselves. Do we need 24/7? Don't know. Perhaps by the end of the grant period we will have an answer to that question!