Submitted by admin-boss on
Communicate quickly with all of the librarians currently online!
When beginning your next shift at Askaway, be sure to join the conference (or be the first to set one up)! This allows you to communicate quickly with all of the librarians who are currently online.
Use conference mode to find out who's online, to co-ordinate transfers at shift changes, or announce important discoveries.
For example:
Submitted by admin-boss on
As some of you have already noted, the Chat Monitor now has a new feature, the All tab.
The All tab lists ongoing questions that other librarians are answering. If you click on one of these questions, you will enter "Conference Mode", where you jump into the conversation already occurring between the student and the librarian who picked up the question from the queue.
This "All" tab is right beside the "My Active" tab, which lists all of the questions that you have picked up from the queue, so please be careful not to confuse the two!
Submitted by admin-boss on
Hi folks.
Happy New Year! This is a quick posting about some technical tips.
1. You'll notice the various upgrades and bug-fixes which were rolled out in early December: better response time, the patron connection status indicators, etc. See my posting for more detail.
2. QuestionPoint will shortly announce that QP is compatible with IE 7. Yayyy!
Submitted by admin-boss on
Throughout the term, Askaway will be providing online professional development tools, available to all Askaway librarians!
As a supplement to your training, these professional development sessions will help familiarise you with more specific information.
Therefore, we need your opinions!
Submitted by admin-boss on
Welcome to the first AskAway update for 2007!
AA Open Expanded Hours
AskAway opens for service on Monday, January 15th with expanded hours:
Sun-Thurs 10 AM – 9 PM; Fri-Sat 11 AM-5 PM
The finalized schedule has been posted to the Librarian's Portal: http://www.eln.bc.ca/vr_portal/staffschedule.html
Staff News
Submitted by admin-boss on
HI folks,
Service Closed Until January
Just a reminder that our last day of service was Friday December 1st - AskAway is now closed until January 15th.
Service-Wide Statistics
For those who are interested, service-wide statistics for September, October and November are now available on the Local Admins tab of the Librarian's Portal: http://www.eln.bc.ca/vr_portal/foradmins.html If you have any questions about the statistics, please let me know .
Submitted by admin-boss on
I just returned from my local public library, where they have a stack of nifty AskAway fridge magnets. I was tempted to take a bunch but managed to restrict myself to just one. Are there any magnets for academic libraries to give our patrons so I won't have to continue to resist temptation?
- Ross Tyner (Okanagan College)
Submitted by admin-boss on
Update to the message below: The upload has been delayed a week. Also, of course, our service is closed as of yesterday, so you won't get to try these features until January.
Great news! The QuestionPoint upgrade scheduled for this weekend should fix a number of minor annoyances. Here's a partial list of the fixes:
Submitted by admin-boss on
Most post-secondary institutions in the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island are closed today due to weather conditions. While this may not affect AskAway staff that are able to work from home, some AskAwayers may not be able to make their shifts. However, with so many students at home today, there may be increased traffic. Here's our strategy:
There will be a notice on the patron login page warning them that service may be affected today due to weather conditions.
If you are not able to make your shift, please send an email to the servprov listserv letting everyone know.
Submitted by admin-boss on
The following tip comes from the AskAway public library service ...
QuestionPoint speed tactics
Some suggestions have been made that QuestionPoint runs much faster if you don't have many Internet Explorer browser windows open. Jane Lucas (one of our Supp Staff) has found that if she runs only the Chat Monitor (and co-browse windows) in IE and then runs all of her other browser tasks from Firefox, she gets much better performance. Perhaps a few of you can try this out and let us all know if that seems to improve chat and IM response.
-Gordon
BCELN