• Vulgar questions, often sexually explicit (as opposed to questions that are about sex, sexuality, etc.).
• Use of rude language, often directed at the librarian.
• General goofing off and not being on task.

The QA&E recognizes that excellent customer service begins with a well-trained staff. But training can only go so far when staff morale is eroded by frequent transactions with inappropriate patrons who are being 'verbally' abusive, belittling or vulgar. In 2005, the QA&E sought to do its first study of inappropriate use among AskColorado patrons. We wanted to answer three questions:

• Will inappropriate use statistics of AskColorado be similar to findings by other statewide virtual reference services?
• Have inappropriate behaviors on AskColorado changed over time?
• Are there recognizable trends regarding the inappropriate behaviors we identify?

To answer these questions we did a comparison survey of transcripts from October 12-19, 2003 and October 10-17, 2004. Seven subcommittee members analyzed a total of 1,369 transcripts, 497 from 2003 and 872 from 2004. Each transcript was coded as being appropriate, 'goofing around', rude, or offensive language/behavior. These categories were chosen both for their general representativeness and because they match the categories used by Maryland’ s AskUsNow! survey of inappropriate use.

The results were forwarded to the QA&E committee co-chairs and the AskColorado Project coordinator, who standardized the coding for all transcripts found to be not totally appropriate. The results of our survey found that 93.5% of all transactions were completely appropriate. Of the 6.5% (89 transactions) inappropriate sessions, only twelve were categorized as offensive.

• We found that between the years, inappropriate use of AskColorado actually decreased from 2003 to 2004. Approximately 8% of the 2003 transactions were deemed somehow inappropriate. That number dropped to 4.73% in 2004.
• Comparing our findings to Maryland’s resulted in very similar numbers. Maryland’s AskUsNow virtual reference service reported 6.01% inappropriate use to our 6.5%.