Refer sessions to other Coop members by joining the 24/7 Cooperative Virtual Group!

If you are in the 24/7 Reference Cooperative, this may have happened to you:

You are an academic librarian, monitoring chat, and a Coop librarian transfers a public library patron to you while you are monitoring. Once the session is done, you would like to transfer the patron’s request to his original library, but you can’t because the patron library is not part of your referral group.

Or

A patron enters your service, but really that person lives in a completely different state. Follow up is needed, but how would you get the session to the correct Cooperative library, when the patron “belongs” to you?

Now there is way for 24/7 Cooperative librarians to refer requests to any other library in the 24/7 Reference Cooperatives: by joining the 24/7 Ref Virtual Group.

As illustrated in the following Presentation:

Join247vc

View more presentations from Questionpoint Oclc.

It involves the following steps:

• Check your GRN Profile approval status
• Join the 24/7 Referral Cooperative
  • In the admin module, choose Virtual Groups
  • Choose Join a Group
  • Find the 24/7 Cooperative Libraries group and click “Join this Group”
  • Await approval
• Once you are approved, you will be able to refer sessions to other Coop members as follows:
  • Open the full view of the transcript you want to refer
  • Click the “refer to” drop down list;
  • Choose “Partner (Cooperative)” and click the arrow button
  • Choose “Show Only Partners with Expertise in:” then
  • Under Group, choose: “24/7 Reference Cooperative libraries”; click the arrow
  • At the “Select Partner” drop-down menu, select the library that you want to refer to;
  • Click the “Refer” button.

It may be that the library you want to refer to is not on the list. This may be because that library is not part of the Cooperative or because the library has not yet gone through the process of joining the 24/7 virtual group, as outlined above.

If you are looking for an individual library and can’t find it, see if there is a statewide group or group-wide referral name that is available for referral.

If you have questions regarding this process, please contact Carol Bonnefil, bonnefic@oclc.org.

Susan McGlamery
QuestionPoint Senior Product Manager
OCLC
mcglames@oclc.org