QuestionPoint: 24/7 reference services

ANNOUNCEMENT: Brief Downtime Tonight

Dear QuestionPoint User:

We are aware that some users are experiencing sluggish response times and occasional disconnects while using the chat monitor.  We plan to install a fix for the performance issue tonight, June 24 EDT.  Please be advised that the QuestionPoint service will be unavailable for approximately 30 minutes, from 01:00 UTC, June 25 (9:00 p.m. EDT, June 24) to 01:30 UTC (9:30 p.m. EDT). It is imperative that you end any in-progress chat sessions at least one minute prior to the scheduled service interruption to avoid sudden communication interruptions to your patrons and potential "hung" sessions. (You will be unable to click on any in-progress sessions to get information to communicate with the patron.)

When service is restored, please check your "New" questions lists for any interrupted chat sessions or unanswered email questions.

If you experience any outage after the projected service period, please contact your Customer Service Provider for further assistance.
We apologize for the inconvenience this is likely to cause.

Regards
The QuestionPoint Team

QuestionPoint downtime this Sunday June 21

Dear QuestionPoint users:

Please be advised that the QuestionPoint service will be unavailable Sunday morning, June 21, from 6:00 UTC (2:00 AM EDT) to approximately 8:00 UTC (4:00 AM EDT).

It is imperative that you end any in-progress chat sessions at least one minute prior to the scheduled service interruption to avoid sudden communication interruptions to your patrons and potential "hung" sessions. (You will be unable to click on any in-progress sessions to get information to communicate with the patron.)

It is possible that service will be restored sooner than scheduled; you may begin trying to login as early as 7:00 UTC (3:00 EDT) if you wish. When service is restored, please check your New questions lists for any interrupted chat sessions or unanswered email questions. An email announcement will be sent to the QuestionPoint listserv after service has been restored.

 
If you experience any outage after the projected service period, please contact your Customer Service Provider for further assistance.

We are sorry for the inconvenience to our users.
Regards,
Your QuestionPoint team

Quality Tip: No Habla Español? Transfer to the Spanish Queue

Cooperative librarians have access to many resources, including our growing Spanish language Cooperative.  If during your shift you happen to pick up a patron who prefers to communicate in Spanish, help may be available from a librarian monitoring the Cooperative Spanish queue.  The Spanish queue is available whenever a bilingual librarian is online and monitoring that queue.   The Spanish queue is staffed by librarians from individual libraries such as Queens PL in New York, statewide services such as Maryland AskUsNow!, and Back Up staff who are bilingual in English and Spanish. The Spanish schedule varies, but here is the current one:  http://www.247ref.org/spanishschedule/libschedule.cfm

You can only transfer to the Spanish Queue if a bilingual librarian is monitoring the Spanish Queue at that time.   To transfer to the Spanish queue, follow these steps:

- Click Transfer

- Click Queues, to see if the Spanish Queue appears

- Select Spanish, then transfer

If the Spanish queue does not appear when you click Queues, then there are no bilingual librarians monitoring the Spanish queue at that time.

If you have any questions about the Spanish language service, including how your library or group can participate in this service, please contact Susan McGlamery at mcglames@oclc.org. 

¡Muchas gracias!

QuestionPoint events at ALA 2009

If you are attending ALA in Chicago, please make plans to attend these 2 QuestionPoint events!

1. QuestionPoint User Group meeting: Sunday July 12, 1:30 to 3:00 PM Chicago Hilton, Lake Michigan Room

2. Best Practices in Cooperative Virtual Reference: Survival tips for tough times, and what our users think of VR services

Budget woes? Natalie Tagge of Illinois' AskAway shares tips on sustaining a virtual reference service even as grant funding ends. And Lynn Connaway (OCLC Office of Research) and Marie Radford (Rutgers University) relate what they learned from users regarding their view of our services.

Time: Saturday, July 11, 1:30 to 3:00 PM Chicago Hilton, Lake Erie Room

Here is more detail about the presentations and our speakers:

"Way Sweet" or "Just Wrong": Users Reveal Critical Factors for Virtual Reference Service Excellence

What do virtual reference service (VRS) users think are the best and worst practices in live chat? The final phases of the Seeking Synchronicity grant project involved online surveys with 137 VRS users and in-depth phone interviews with 76 VRS users. Use of the Critical Incident Technique identified important factors in users' perceptions of success and failure. This presentation provides an overview of these findings with numerous candid examples from the users. We asked, they definitely answered. Be prepared to hear about the good, the bad, and the ugly in users' perceptions of live chat.

Lynn Silipigni Connaway, Ph.D., is a Senior Research Scientist at OCLC Research whose research areas include the study of information-seeking behaviors, query log analysis, and data mining to provide evidence for making informed decisions for the development of library services and systems.

Marie L. Radford, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor at Rutgers University and a leading researcher and consultant in evaluating virtual reference and in investigating interpersonal communication in library contexts.

Sustainable Virtual Reference: AskAway IL's Best Practices for Future Quality of Service

The last year has been full of changes for the AskAway IL project: The IMLS grant that funded the AskAway IL project ended, budget cuts made travel for training and outreach unfeasible and AskAway IL will no longer have a full time coordinator in the near future. So woe is the AskAway IL project, right? Wrong! Find out how AskAway IL through the dedication of the over 200 libraries that participate in the project, the Illinois State Library's continued support and the hard work of a Statewide Virtual Reference Advisory Board have met goals for sustainability and continued quality to serve Illinois users.

Natalie Tagge is Illinois Virtual Reference Coordinator at the Illinois State Library. She is in charge of the AskAway Illinois virtual reference cooperative. In other lives, she worked on a dairy farm, taught high school and waited tables, all of which she finds relevant to her current profession.

Register to attend these 2 QuestionPoint events: www.oclc.org/info/ala/

Thanks, and we look forward to seeing you there!

 

Quality Tip: Use "Send Message to Librarian" if you selected the Wrong Resolution Code!

"Oops! I meant to send that to Followup!" you exclaim in dismay as you read the message on the screen: "Resolution code set: Answered." You had already verified the patron's email address because the patron had asked to receive a response from the local librarian.

What should you do now?

Fortunately, it is fairly easy to fix this not-so-uncommon situation!

First, go to the My QuestionPoint homepage and click the "Active" link (found in the "My Questions" section in the left-hand sidebar). There, you will see a list of sessions you have marked Answered; you can click on the correct question to open the full Question History.

When you click the "Send Message to Librarian" link (found in the middle of the "Question Detail" section of the patron's information, above the actual transcript text), you will see a message box preceded by the question ID and the local librarian's email address:

 

Before typing your message, you should take a look at the "To:" field to make sure that the message will be going to the email address of the library you wish to contact. (If you have any questions, just click the Cancel button and send to Quality instead).

Here is a sample message you can send:

I meant to send this question to followup but accidentally chose the Answered code. Would you send an Answer to the patron? Thank you!

<Your Name>, <your email address>

If you are a librarian who has received one of these messages, you can simply go into QuestionPoint and view the Question ID…just click the Answer button to send a response to the patron.

Note: If you are ever uncertain about a message you have received from a fellow librarian, please send an email to qpquality@gmail.com and the Quality Team will take a look at the situation.

Do you have any questions or comments about this Quality Tip? If so, please post a note to the Blog or contact Susan McGlamery at mcglames@oclc.org

UK Higher Education User Group meeting, May 20 2009

The HE user group meeting was held May 20, 2009 in the OCLC office in Birmingham.

1) Customer Update

Sandie Brunnen - Liverpool University

Chat is going well, they have the Qwidget and receive 2 chats for every 1 email. Chat is offered 9 AM to 5 PM.

Joe Schulkins, System Librarian - Liverpool University also present. Set up Qwidget at Liverpool. First time at a User Group meeting and interested in hearing about other developments.

Graeme Eddie – Edinburgh University

Have been using QuestionPoint for 8 years now and until 3-4 months ago have been only using the Ask module (email). Have been trialing chat part-time, but there has been little uptake on chat. Publicity wise, it has been a soft launch of chat, as there is some trepidation about the volume of calls if promote more widely. They do not have a converged service: the IT department is still using the in-house request system.

Staffing, 1 hr in the morning and 1 hr in the afternoon (not the same times each day), Monday to Friday. Finding that email is still predominantly used with very little chat, although this could be because the times are not consistent.

86% queries come from Edinburgh University, 7% UK & Ireland, 6% international.

Many questions from external sources are genealogical. Hope to implement the Qwidget in the future on their updated websites to re-capture ‘passing trade’.

Michael Dunne – Lancaster University

Went live with chat in September 2007, staffed Monday to Friday 9-5. Not a converged service. Very quiet in the morning. Added the Qwidget to the home page about a year ago, and saw a huge leap in the volume of questions after that. They may start to restrict hours next year as the mornings are very quiet. They are not a converged service, but if they were they would be busier.

Although promoted as a virtual reference service, they have been disappointed there have not been more in-depth reference questions, most are directional questions, password questions and fines/circulation questions. Wondering how you can get people to ask more reference and research questions?

They market the service with the new intake at the start of the year. They have links in the catalogue, on the homepage, on the contacts page and Michael also has it in his email signature. Would be interested to know how other academics are doing with the number of questions compared to FTE’s.

Simone Ngozi Okolo – University of London

Implemented chat in January 2009. Using both chat and email. Staffing is now 1-5 Monday to Friday, it started out as 11-3, but not much chat before 1pm. Publicising using the Qwidget from the outset, have it on the homepage and also dotted around within the website and are now looking to see how it is being used, and what pages people are coming in from. They have about 4-5 chats per day. With about 4 people staffing a session for an hour at a time, there are 20 staff that participate across all the sites – taking chat sessions and answering emails.

The pop-up can be a problem as not all pcs have sound. (Several other libraries commented on this: Enquire public libraries have speakers, and one of the libraries uses headsets). The types of question they are getting are about e-resources and accessing them. Many also about circulation, fines etc and others from outside the university and from other universities. It is going well, but hard to keep selling to staff and to keep them motivated. Compared to a year ago the email traffic has increased a lot, so it is certainly increasing awareness.

Franko Kowalczuk – King’s College

Have been using QuestionPoint for around 18 months. Franko manages QuestionPoint, 4 service desks and the help desk, they are a fully converged service. They want to actively get away from the ‘Librarian’ tagging, as it is not what they are called and they are much more IT focused. Removing the ‘librarian’ association in the chat would widen the scope of the service and make it a better tool. Last summer it went off the scale with around 400 – 600 chats a month being common, has since calmed down but traffic still high, approx 200 chats a month They have had a low key launch of the Qwidget, so waiting to see how that impacts. Launching a new Student Portal shortly.

Matt Thompson, Andy Dodds, Anne Williams – University of Birmingham

Has also used the Qwidget for inter-library communication, he was asking Frank at King’s about their service.

Using QuestionPoint since 2003. Last autumn a new team was set up dedicated to QuestionPoint and the Enquiry Desk: the Information Point team, which Matt is part of and it is run by Anne Williams.

Since setting up the Qwidget in September 2008, they have become much more visible, with the Qwidget being sited in the catalogue, help pages and the student portal.

The service runs from 10-6 and 6-8 and they are very happy with the success of the service, mostly due to the Qwidget. Two staff monitor the queue. Occasionally 2-3 simultaneous chats take place.

Andy Dodds and Anne Williams have had chat since 2004 and it wasn’t that popular, don’t know if it was wholly to do with positioning, as the look and feel of the form wasn’t ideal either. Birmingham University IT department had (and still has) its own messaging system which is very successful, so chat was always competing with this and until implementing the Qwidget it was failing. Since implementing the Qwidget the kudos of the library has increased exponentially with other departments wanting some of the kind of kudos they are having in overwhelmingly positive survey comments, which, until the Qwidget were unheard of. In the first month of implementing the Qwidget they had 1200 chats! And it has remained extremely popular since. There are not so many questions on second line subjects as before, but they are considering a second line service for the experts. The new service (Qwidget) is in the same place as the link for previous chat, but it is much more visible. Anne canvassed students in some market research before re-designing the webpages and embedding the Qwidget, some of the feedback was that the link for the chat form was situated on the right of the screen and looked like an advert, so people didn’t take much notice.

They use scripts for holding – asking for an email to get back to them offline, and regularly have 2 or 3 simultaneous sessions at busy times.

Implementation and take up of the Qwidget has enhanced the whole libraries reputation, never has a service in the university attracted such consistently positive feedback.

Would like to know more about referring to specialists.

Neerja Gautam - University of Wolverhampton

Using chat since 2006. Staffed 11am – 10pm term time and 12-5pm off term. After 5pm chats tend to trail off, with only 3-4 sessions after 5pm.

Launched the Qwidget about a year ago, and have got more questions. They are thinking about co-browse and email now.

The team are mostly left to it as it is so stable, so they are happy.

They undertook to review all of their transcripts, and it revealed over 200 types of query. This in turn has led them to develop a chat bot, to access the QuestionPoint knowledge base, they are hoping to go live with it in the new academic year. They will be the first university in the UK to do something like this, with the University of Hamburg already having one.

For information on Stella at the University of Hamburg see:

www.sub.uni-hamburg.de :

http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/services/lis/ticer/07carte/publicat/07christensen.pdf

Anne Beech – Natural England

Looking to acquire QuestionPoint, to be used not only in the library but across all the enquiry points - so interested in everyones views

Robert Cole – Liverpool University

Just implemented the Qwidget this year and queries have overtaken email 2:1 with a few hundred per month. They had a soft launch as again concerned about staffing with an increased volume of chats. Staffed 9-5 Monday to Friday with one librarian and also principal library assistants covering. Email questions have not dipped, but stayed mostly the same, so chat appealing to a different audience.

Carol McMaster - Anglia Ruskin University

Not a converged service and split geographically between 4 sites based around Chelmsford and Peterborough. They had a 2 phased approach, launching email first in late 2008 (November) and then chat earlier this year in March. They ran a competition to decide on a name for the service. Chat available 11.00am-4.00pm although as yet not much uptake. They had similar issues with staff not always seeing chats coming in due to the pop up alerts not displaying to the front. They have resolved this by staff having headphones. Has been a challenge managing the staffing of the service over the 4 sites.

2) Service Development Update – plans for 2009/2010 including QuestionPoint and mobile devices:

Susan McGlamery, Director, QuestionPoint Programs

QuestionPoint is in 24 countries, most recently Spain, Italy, UAE, Puerto Rico, Peru and Brazil, so the Spanish speaking countries are coming on board in droves.

On the librarian side, it is accessible in 11 languages, and many more languages on the patron side.

There are 2,300 libraries using QuestionPoint and most participate in the 24/7 cooperative, with non-US participants being the UK Enquire service and Mexico.

There are 20,000 questions in the global knowledge base accessible to everyone.

Information -

To keep up to date with information about the service, there is a QuestionPoint blog [http://questionpoint.blogs.com/], including information about upcoming installs, hints tips and quality tips.

Chat problems that may have occurred recently have been resolved, so you should be experiencing network issues accessing QuestionPoint. Please let us know if this is still not the case.

There is an encrypted version of QuestionPoint using the https:// protocol. This gets around data protection issues that certain institutions may have.

(Lancaster wondered if this would solve their IE issue with the VLE, FireFox works, but IE keeps prompting to advise secure/unsecure data, so had to remove from their VLE)

Reports – there has been simplification of the reports process, with a reports tab from the home page.

Forms manager – allows for self management and creation of email and chat forms.

(See Presentation slides)

3) Qwidget developments & review

Future features that are being looked at:

- Optimizimg the Qwidget for placing on institutional pages in Facebook (not in personal accounts)

- More options on customizing the Qwidget

- Using twitter type technology to text a question

- Full text searching of transcripts

(See Presentation slides)

A more specific statement regarding new enhancements planned for Summer 2009 will be sent to the QP listserv and blog within the next several weeks.

4) QuestionPoint Clinic including Quick Tips for key topics:

§ Handling multiple questions

§ Referring questions to a colleague/expert

§ Knowledge base

§ Patron accounts

§ New chat features

§ Reports

Christine Jones, Applicant Services Consultant and Susan McGlamery, Director, QuestionPoint Programs

(See Presentation slides)

5) Future enhancements requested by attendees

1. Edit/ Delete function buttons in transcript when a reply comes in: add to a header as it only displays as a footer, it opens another edit box anyway, so making it more obvious would help.

1. Refer to an email partner – do not strip out personal data. In some instances that person needs to reply directly to a customer as they have accessed the library rather than another IT related service. The library does not need the reply back for their records, only that it was sent to an email referral. If the personal information was included it would save it having to be cut and pasted into the comments and would be a more effective workflow.

1. Settings – as well as having ‘my addresses’ for emails, have ‘institutional addresses’ as many are the same contacts for the University and would save inputting for each User ID

1. Automatic messages – “A librarian will be with you shortly…..” should be able to be customized

1. Remove the term ‘Librarian’ and allow a customizable field to be inserted relevant to the needs of the institution.

1. Add access to the Knowledge Base within the chat monitor, so it can be searched whilst in chat and not accessing in another window

1. Knowledge Base – keywords and required update date should be required fields

1. Can an institutions particular vocabulary be imported instead of the LOC classifications? This would be useful for organizations that have a controlled thesaurus in use as at Natural England.

1. Activity stats in local time not EST – conversion of time zone in reporting

1. Spellchecker available to librarians

1. Indication that other person is chatting during a session. To be available on both the patron and librarian side.

1. Make known issues publicly available to the institutions. OCLC have a publicly visible list with OLIB products, makes visible who has requested what enhancements the most and may make anticipation of what may be included in forthcoming releases more obvious.

Susan explained there were quarterly meetings to discuss what is in the enhancement system it needs to be aligned to:

1. does it fit our mission
2. does it fit into the plan for the next release

The universities agreed it would be good to see a list of everything, to see who had requested it the most and if it is something they too would benefit from, as may just not have thought of it yet.

Would also be good to have a UK academic virtual user group meeting to find out things in between, as well as the generic QuestionPoint webinars.

QuestionPoint is planning quarterly virtual meetings. The last one was held 3 times in April: April 14, 15 and 16. The presentation for this meeting is posted to the Blog: http://questionpoint.blogs.com/questionpoint_247_referen/2009/04/virtual-user-group-meetings.html

Suggestions from the group that the user group could be more of a user community for the users and run by the users of the group. Information was given by Anne Beach, NE, on how the OCLC OLIB user Group is run.

6) New customers, potential prospects and other activities

New QuestionPoint customers added since last user meeting include Anglia Ruskin University and University of East London.

Manchester Metropolitan University signed a contract Have not implemented QuestionPoint to date but plan to do so during 2009.

In addition, Royal College of Nursing has joined the Chasing the Sun group of UK and Australian health/medical libraries.

In the public library sector – the Ask Scotland service will be launched in June. Ask Scotland is a virtual reference service, providing both a national collaborative service and the means for locally delivered services. Initially staffed co-operatively by public libraries in Scotland, the service brings together a network of professional librarian expertise from all over Scotland. The service will enable greater use of public libraries and their unique collections and resources to answer all Scottish history related queries. The national collaborative service is available via email, and is free to any member of the public. A chat service is anticipated to be launched later this year.

A UK focused QuestionPoint webinar was held on 23^rd April aimed at libraries interested in virtual reference. Franko Kowalczuk, King’s College London participated in the webinar and over 30 UK librarians signed up to attend and OCLC is in discussion with a number of leads. King’s College London has been visited by a number of librarians from the following institutions: Hertfordshire University, Westminster University, RCN, University of East London, Imperial College, Napier University, Falmouth University College, LSE and Victoria and Albert Museum.

London School of Economics and University of the West of England are currently trialing QuestionPoint.. Imperial College will trial shortly.

Here are the presentations shared at the meeting:

QuestionPoint clinic:

Question Point Clinic 200509

View more OpenOffice presentations from guest1683d36.

QuestionPoint update:

2009 Spring Uk He

View more OpenOffice presentations from guest1683d36.

ANNOUNCEMENT: QuestionPoint down time this Sunday, 7 June

Please be advised that as part of the previously announced system-wide maintenance for OCLC services, the QuestionPoint service will be unavailable from 5:00 UTC (1:00 EDT) to approximately 11:00 UTC (7:00 EDT) Sunday June 7.

It is imperative that you end any in-progress chat sessions at least one minute prior to the scheduled service interruption to avoid sudden communication interruptions to your patrons and potential "hung" sessions. (You will be unable to click on any in-progress sessions to get information to communicate with the patron.)

It is possible that service will be restored sooner than scheduled; you may begin trying to login as early as 9:00 UTC (5:00 EDT) if you wish. When service is restored, please check your “New” questions lists for any interrupted chat sessions or unanswered email questions.

An email announcement will be sent to the QuestionPoint listserv after service has been restored.

If you experience any outage after the projected service period, please contact your Customer Service Provider for further assistance.

As always, we regret any inconvenience to our users.

Regards
The QuestionPoint Team