In our first posting, we focused on tips and tricks for chat reference. But there are just as many great tips and tricks for email reference. So today we’d like to offer two tips.
How can I quickly check my spelling in my answers before sending them?
A spell checker is an essential tool for providing quality answers. Some librarians, when preparing a lengthy answer, will use Word to write the text and check its spelling and grammar there. Then they cut and paste the answer into the QuestionPoint Answer field.
But a number of spell checkers are now available on the Internet. One such tool is ieSpell (www.iespell.com) for Internet Explorer. It offers different language dictionaries plus you can customize the dictionaries. While it is free for personal use, the author does offer discounts on both volume licenses and site licenses that make this software quite inexpensive.
Firefox 2.0 goes one better. The latest version of this open source browser has an in-line spell checker built into it. This means if the spell checker is turned on, it will spell check as you type in web form, including those for the QuestionPoint Ask module, without having to purchase or install additional software.
Why must I edit a patron reply before doing anything else on the transaction?
Many of you have noted that replies coming into QuestionPoint from outside (from patrons, from e-mail partners) are sometimes difficult to understand, and the question history often repeats. QuestionPoint is not itself an e-mail server; it simply passes text to an e-mail server and accepts text from an e-mail server. It cannot recognize one kind of text (e.g., an e-mail header) from any other kind.
Think of a reply from a patron as simply an e-mail message. If the patron’s e-mail client has the retain-previous-messages utility turned on, a reply will include all foregoing text in the e-mail message to which s/he is replying. Most clients do work this way, unless the user purposely turns it off. If the foregoing text is not deleted before you save the patron’s message, you will have two versions of the transaction history saved! And when you respond, again, to the patron, everything in the history is sent once again.
To read a reply, you need look only at the very top. When you see –Original Message— as in the example below, you are getting into “history” that is already recorded in QuestionPoint.
The easiest thing to do is to click on Edit, delete everything up to and including –Original Message-, and then click Save.
Now your history includes only the patron’s reply, and not the reply plus everything else in the original message to the patron!
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