Commercial reference services
Commercial reference services are great for many reasons. One big one for libraries is that they will handle everything for you. All the library has to do is subscribe to the service and all the hassles of setting up IM reference, staffing it, and worrying about the time constraints of reference librarians disappear. This is certainly attractive to many libraries. The service can then also be available 24 hours, something that is attractive to many users. Libraries, even large university libraries, simply do not have the funds to be open 24 hours every day, but people are now used to the always-available nature of most things on the internet, including shopping and information-seeking. A library service that parallels this availability will be helpful and used, as long as it is advertised to its fullest potential.
Of course, everything has its downside. Commercialized chat has been called impersonal and abrupt. IM reference is certainly a solution to this problem. It is personally staffed by people from your local library who know the answers to all the local questions. They are friendlier and spend more time with you. However, they are bound by the constraints of time: they only staff the IM ref desk during open hours and they can have difficulties choosing between the person in front of them and the person on the computer. This seems to me a great deal like the tension between the mom-and-pop shop and the big corporate chains. Of course you get better service going into Carey's Bookstore, but Barnes and Noble is closer, faster, open on Sundays, and definitely has what you need. Ultimately, it seems like the big chains are winning out simply because of ease of use, and this may be what happens with commercial chat reference.
For the librarians, commerical services are clearly easier to use. However, for the end-user, IM reference may actually be simpler--it's a box on the library website. However, at 2 am, the commercial service will certainly be the better. Ideally, the library would have both: IM for during the day when the library is open, commercial for all other hours. Financially speaking, however, this may not be feasible, and libraries will have to choose.
