Quality Tip: Surviving Busy Times, Part 2

Last week I discussed tips for staffing the service during times when many students enter the queue at once. Many times, these students are accessing the service at school, either in the library or during a study period. Last week, we discussed the importance of finding out how long the student is able to be online with you, getting an email, and sending lists of resources. See http://questionpoint.blogs.com/questionpoint_247_referen/2009/03/quality-tip-surviving-and-thriving-during-busy-times.html for last week’s tip.

This week, we will focus more on specific resources and search strategies you can use with students during busy times:

1. Use the library policy page to gain access to the library's databases.

Most likely, the student is accessing the service through a location that has provided access to the library's subscription databases. The policy page will contain a link to the library’s databases, as well as a library card number or a username/password for the chatting librarian to use. After searching in a separate window to test out search terms for relevancy, you can suggest a particular database for the student to try, as well as specific search terms.

Here are some advantages to showing a patron the library databases:

· The student becomes aware of the authoritative resources offered by the local library.

· Database pages are unlikely to be blocked by school filters.

2. Use Credo Reference, found in the "Cooperative Resources" section of the My QuestionPoint homepage.

Any librarian in the 24/7 Reference Cooperative can use Credo to help their online patrons. The URLs can be pasted into the live chat session for the student to use. Credo provides a portal to a variety of reputable reference resources from 55 publishers, including text and images. See this previous posting to the QuestionPoint Blog for more information: http://questionpoint.blogs.com/questionpoint_247_referen/2008/03/quality-tip-cre.html

3. Use Google Books efficiently.

A search in books.google.com will often quickly yield easy-to-assimilate, authoritative information that directly answers the student's question. To use Google Books efficiently, try these advanced search strategies:

· Add subject headings to limit the search, particularly this one: subject:"juvenile nonfiction"

· Limit the search to "Limited Preview and Full View" or simply "Full View" to maximize the information that the student can use.

· Remember that the archives of many popular magazines have been made available in their entirety. You can limit your search to just "Magazines" in the "Content" section of the Advanced Book Search.

· To quickly direct the patron to a specific location in the page you're viewing, go to the Search box at the top of the right-hand sidebar of the page and type a phrase from the middle of a relevant sentence. The search result in the right-hand sidebar will then display the page number and a brief excerpt of the text that can be copied and pasted to the patron. For example:

Page 109

The object of Hacky Sack was to keep the bag in the air, using the knees and the feet, without letting the bag touch the ground or the player's upper body. ...

4. Remember to check textbooks' websites.

If a student's question seems like it might be related to information in the student's textbook, ask the patron for the name of the textbook. The textbook website often has a study guide and other tutorials that may give the student the needed information.

5. Be aware that the sites you send might be blocked by school filters.

It is becoming increasingly common to hear students say that they cannot see a website we send to them because it was blocked by a school filter. If you analyze the content and judge it to be appropriate, you can try using the Google Cache or the Internet Archive to send the page from those resources instead.

Questions or comments about this topic? Comment below or email Susan McGlamery at mcglames@oclc.org.

Comments

[Susan McGlamery]

Someone asked for more information about Google cache. Here is more information from Wren, our Quality guru:

When the sites we send to patrons are blocked, we have occasionally had success by resending the site using a URL from the Google Cache or Internet Archive. However, it depends on the nature of the library's filtering software.

Here is one example of a site that a librarian sent to a student but the student was unable to see it due to the school's filtering software:

The full text of THE NOBEL LECTURE of Mother Teresa of Calcutta Delivered Dec. 11, 1979, the day after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, Dec. 10 in Oslo, Norway.

This site was blocked: http://www.priestsforlife.org/articles/mtnobel.htm

However, when the librarian went to Google, typed in the URL in the search box, and clicked the "Cached" link on the first result and sent this URL instead, the student was able to see the site and was appreciative:

http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:22OrGnJn2wEJ:www.priestsforlife.org/articles/mtnobel.htm+THE+NOBEL+LECTURE+of+Mother+Teresa+of+Calcutta+Delivered+Dec.+11,+1979,+the+day+after+receiving+the+Nobel+Peace+Prize,+Dec.+10+in+Oslo,+Norway.&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

Here is another site that was blocked by the school's filters--it looks authoritative, with bibliographical references at the end:
http://www.equalrightsamendment.org/era.htm

However, I do not know if the Google Cache strategy would work because the librarian did not try it during the live chat session. If the school's filtering software is keyword-based, then maybe the site was blocked because it says: "Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex."

As for the Internet Archive, you can test out the Wayback Machine here:
http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

Using the ERA site as an example, here is what the URL would look like:
http://web.archive.org/web/20000620022935/http://www.equalrightsamendment.org/era.htm

Again, these strategies might not work all of the time but we do have evidence that they have worked in some cases.

I hope this helps! Thanks for asking, and thanks for reading the QP Blog!

- Wren