Peter Scott's Library Blog mentions that William H. Welch Medical Library, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine has a newly-developed Virtual Reference Application which allows librarians and patrons to interact with one another in real time. Features include chatting, co-browsing, and document sharing. Welch Medical Library invites you to help beta test the product. Their goal is to develop a solid, open-source virtual reference application that can be freely distributed to other libraries.

I have provided virtual reference briefly at my previous position. I think of the problems I encountered most was the program had some issues with firewalls. The program worked but sometimes certain things like co-browing just never quite worked correctly. I look forward to Hopkins product, hopefully it will handle firewalls a little better.