Return on Investment: Is Virtual Reference Worth the Cost?

I just got a chance to go through the first day of poster sessions and I saw a lot of interesting and thought provoking posters. One poster in particular Return on Investment: Is Virtual Reference Worth the Cost? really captured my attention.

It seems in academic libraraies and some academic medical libraries there are a lot of librarians interested and promoting virtual reference and IM reference. People have debated about whether IM reference was worth the time and effort (and money) of the library staff to provide to students. According to this abstract this library ( ) decided to discontinue their virtual reference service because of the high cost/low benefit of the service.

Interesting. I wonder what other libraries who are doing virtual reference are finding? Is this unique to health sciences libraries or do public, academic, and other libraries have these questions?