Record Breaking Day

I just wanted to share some exciting news. We had a record breaking day yesterday! Our awesome team of librarians handled 114 questions! Yesterday between 4-6 PM we had 35 questions!

We have been seeing our statistics steadily on the rise and many of you have worked some very busy shifts lately. I want to thank you all for so much hard work. You have all done really well to handle this increase in traffic.

I checked the transcripts thinking we might have had a school group or some pranksters in yesterday, artificially bloating the stats, but I was pleased to see that we had some great, really focused research questions and reference requests. I saw some really good transcripts. Please look over your recent transcripts and nominate your best ones for our reference service award. To nominate just go to the librarian toolbox and click on “Nominate a Transcript of the Month”.

Again, congratulations and good job!

View Archives of Previous Feed

We are moving to a new feed along with a new blog. The archives of the previous feed are available at: http://info.askalibrarian.org/newsArchive.asp.

About Us

Ask a Librarian is Florida’s Virtual Reference Project. Part of the Florida Electronic Library, a State Library project funded with LSTA funds.

The service went live July 28, 2003 with 14 libraries and limited hours. The service now has 89 libraries and is open 10am-Midnight EST Sunday – Thursday and 10-5 EST on Friday and Saturday.

The service is staffed by librarians throughout Florida and several library school students intern to assist with night hours.

Contact information:

Diana Sachs-Silveria, Virtual Reference Manager, 813.622.8252 ext 234, email: sachsd@tblc.org. Diana is the Project Manager and oversees the Ask a Librarian project. Her day to day activities include budget, marketing, promotion, recruiting new members, troubleshooting, and overall project development.

Jennifer Gregor, Virtual Reference Coordinator, 813.622.8252 ext 233; email: gregorj@tblc.org. Jennifer is the day to day coordinator of Ask a Librarian. Her day to day activities include managing the desk (90+ libraries in over 260 scheduling slots!!), training and troubleshooting.

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E-mail permissions error

An issue has been discovered with the way the Docutek system handles the auto-notification and follow up of e-mail questions.

After following the “Click here to view question details” link in the notification message this error message appears:

“You do not have proper permissions to view this question. If you think you are receiving this message in error please contact your local VRL Plus Manager.”

After clicking on ok, the message reloads and you get stuck in an endless loop.

This error occurs because the question the librarian is trying to log in to handle has already been assigned to another librarian at their institution.  The system will only allow one user at a time to work on a question to avoid duplication of effort.  We have notified Docutek of the work flow issues that this error raises and they are working on a solution.  Please bear with us as we work through this inconvenience.

Please let us know if you have questions about this or any other issue.

Online Practice Sessions

I have scheduled two online practice sessions. Join us online on Wednesday, the 20th from 2-4 and Monday, the 25th from 9:30-11:30. These sessions are available for anyone who would like to practice. To join your Ask a Librarian colleagues from across the state, go to info.askalibrarian.org/training.asp, choose your library from the drop down menu and sign in. You can also take a turn practicing as a patron by choosing a library from the “As a Patron” drop down menu. I will be online during the listed times as either a librarian or a patron, so I hope to see you there. Let me know if you have any questions or have trouble logging in.

Administrator Rights Transcript Issue

There is a new technical issue that has emerged this week and Docutek is working to resolve the issue. When a site coordinator (or other local administrator account), tries to view session transcripts for their staff the drop down menu does not contain the correct names. The list that appears is a shortened list with numerous ‘VRL Manager’ accounts.

We hope this is resolved soon. We will post updates here.

Please let us know if this happens by emailing the helpdesk at askalibrarian@tblc.org or commenting to the blog.

UPDATE: The bug that was preventing many of you from viewing your co-workers transcripts is now fixed. Under the drop-down for ‘Created By” all of the staff from your library should be visible. Remember to view results, you must also change the filtering options for ‘date range’ and ‘maximum results’. Please let me know immediately if this is not the case.

Exemplary Reference Service Awards

Ask a Librarian is rolling out its new Exemplary Reference Awards to recognize great service in our chat service. We are looking for the best chats you or your co-workers have had this summer. We are looking for nominees in three categories: ‘Best Detailed Chat’, ‘Best Brief Chat’ and ‘Best Teaching Chat.’
The transcript awarded the ‘Best Detailed Chat’ by the Quality Assurance Workgroup will receive a $20 gift card to Borders. Other honored sessions with receive frame-able certificates and be promoted on the Ask a Librarian web site as examples of great reference work.

Please take a look at your own and your co-workers sessions.

The Quality Assurance Workgroup will evaluate all nominated sessions on the following criteria:
* Demonstrated the following qualities: accuracy, authority, objectivity, currency, and coverage.
* Preformed a reference interview with the patron, asking questions to clarify the information need
* Calls should be answered as quickly as possible while staying communicative with the user. Try to keep sessions to 20 minutes or less.”
*”Whenever possible, use information from library resources.” (Proprietary Databases are better than Google or Yahoo.)
*”Always use a reference source to locate the answer to a question an always give the caller the name of the source.”
*”If unable to locate an authoritative answer to a question in a timely fashion, then either get back to the patron in a few hours (do a follow-up) or refer the question to local library.

Nominations for exemplary transcripts can be submitted online in the Ask a Librarian Toolbox. Please consider nominating a co-worker’s session, another Ask a Librarian you ran across or your own! Great Reference work needs to be rewarded!!

Nominations should be submitted before September 20th for sessions that occurred between July 1- August 31!

Training tips

This is where I will be posting training tips, reminders and ideas. I hope to regularly post a topic of the week to help us all keep our skills fresh.

Participant Survey

We are currently doing an annual survey of our participants. We want to know about your experiences on Ask a Librarian.

The survey is very short, and we really appreciate any feedback you can provide. Its located at: http://www.askalibrarian.org/COLLABORATIVE/vrleb_survey_administer.asp?survey_id=69

The survey will be live until September 15th. I’ll post the survey results on the blog and post to the mailing lists.

Web Searching

Mike Whaley from PJC shared a “Rethinking Google’s Rethinking Google’s system Human- powered search premieres” on a new commercial chat service with our mailing list today. One of the most fasinating aspects to me was the statement:

“30 percent of Web users either do not get their questions answered or take an average of 11 minutes to find information using traditional algorithmic-based Web search engines.”

Further, of interest is visiting ChaCha, I received a message, due to the popularity of the service we can’t answer your question. Come back later. Not very user-friendly. The article describes what the service will do, what librarians have been doing for years, like its groundbreaking. Its fustrating- you just want to yell – visit your library or Ask a Librarian we have been doing this for years!

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