The QuestionPoint User Group meeting was held at the ALA Annual Conference in Washington DC on June 27, 2010.
Nancy Huling, chair of the QuestionPoint User Council, opened the meeting shortly after 1:30 PM. After introductions, Susan McGlamery, senior product manager for QuestionPoint, presented the QuestionPoint overview (see accompanying PowerPoint presentation). The two new features introduced on June 13, Librarian is Typing indicator and Customized Descriptive Codes, were discussed.
Several questions were asked about the custom descriptive codes. Libraries participating in the 24/7 Reference Cooperative face a situation where the chatting librarian is usually not from the patron’s institution. This may be an issue since the chatting librarian can append a descriptive code at the end of a session, and a code assigned by a chatting librarian may not be the code that the patron library would have chosen. Fortunately, the chatting librarian will only see the descriptive code list of the patron library, which will help. Other ooperative the chatting librarian is often not at the patron’s institution (in the Cooperative, the descriptive codes of the patron’s library appear at the end of a chat session). Other recommendations include:
· If a chatting librarian has added descriptive codes to one of your sessions and you want to remove the code, simply go to the Full question view and click Add Descriptive Code. You will now be able to change the descriptive codes added by another librarian. You can replace one code with another. To completely remove a code that’s been added, simply choose the first option on the list ([Select Code]) as your code. This will cause a blank code to appear.
· If you do not want any codes to appear in your descriptive code list, you could set up a new list with only one code: None
Here is the complete QuestionPoint presentation:
Discussion topics
Attendees were asked to come up with topics for discussion. The topics that the group suggested were:
- Is texting still relevant with mobile Qwidget available?
- What are people doing to motivate staff – to improve skills? How to deal with staff burnout?
- How to handle questions from LIS students?
- Anyone using Jing or screencasting on the fly?
- Sustainability—how to handle budget cutbacks?
- What are the potential limits on the service? Staffing? Time?
- Innovative uses of QP ?
- Do you get constructive feedback from users that affects the online presentation of your services?
- Policy pages: how to encourage use in own institution and in the cooperative?
In the next several weeks, we will explore each discussion topic in a separate blog posting. I will include any discussion that occurred at ALA, but please do add your comments to the blog discussion. There were so many discussion topics and so little time that the user group at ALA only discussed 3 of these topics, so all can participate in this community discussion!
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