Submitted by admin-boss on
There has been a rash of technical troubles lately, with folks not appearing to be logged on, or folks thinking that they are stuck staffing the service by themselves. In almost all cases this has been due to incorrect settings, or un-cleared caches or cookies. Although the service is fairly quiet this term, there are busy times (11 calls per hour!), so we want to make sure service providers are never staffing the service alone.
1. If you find yourself on the service alone, and particularly if it appears that no calls are coming in, please let Sunni (778.782.6937) or Gordon (778.782.7002) know so that we can determine if it is a technical issue or not.
2. If you are unable to reach anyone and no calls appear to be coming in, try going through your settings, deleting the temporary internet files and cookies, logging out of the service and shutting down Internet Explorer, and then opening it all up again and logging in again. (See the Check Your IE Settings information on the Portal: http://eln.bc.ca/askaway/documents/CheckIESettings.pdf)
3. If you are staffing the service alone and can’t reach Gordon or Sunni, try going to the policy page of the library scheduled to be on with you to see if you can contact one of the AskAway administrators at that institution.
AskAway Schedule is posted at:
http://eln.bc.ca/askaway/index.php?page=staffschedule
Library policy pages are listed on the Portal: http://eln.bc.ca/askaway/index.php?page=profiles
4. If you are swamped with an influx of calls and are unable to contact anyone, try sending a quick “Swamped!” message to the eln-vrefservprov listserv to see if anyone can jump in to help you. (This works famously on the public library side!)
5. If you are unable to contact anyone during your shift, please send Gordon or Sunni an email afterwards letting us know what happened so that we are aware of these incidences – they may give us clues as to the frequency of technical issues that we can then report to QP.
As always, let us know if you have any questions or concerns about this!
Sunni
BC ELN