[Answerland] November Answerland Updates & Best Practices

[COX Jennifer * SLO]

Good Afternoon Answerland Staff,


Vacation, Breaks and Holiday Closures
Tis the season to have a density of observed holidays, breaks and closures at Answerland Libraries. Please take a few moments to note those dates and submit a “Time off” Request form<https://247cooperative.libstaffer.com/form/time-off> for any length of time or multiple days that you will not be available or your library will be closed. This is likely more applicable to our academic library partners that have long break closures. If it’s just a day or two that you will be closed for holidays and your regularly scheduled shift, please go into Libstaffer and drop those shifts so a “missed punch” does not occur. If I missed punch occurs, just email me and I’ll make sure to resolve the time clock issue.

New Partner Library & In Status for Partner Libraries
Clackamas Community College- Please welcome a new Full Partner Library to Answerland! We onboarded Clackamas CC in October. They are still getting their feet wet into the Answerland Cooperative model
                                                         but please be aware that questions from their patrons will not be showing up in the Answerland queue. Please take a moment to review their FAQs so you know their
                                                         preferences for assisting their patrons.


Springfield Public Library- SPL is changing from a Full Partner Library to a Referral Partner. They will still have questions forwarded to them but it will be in a different way. Do you know who is an Answerland
Referral Partner Library?  Check out the Referral Partner Library list on the Answerland website or a good way to do this is to explore the  Please use the Address book to send the question to their designated representative.  From the ticket view,  Transfer to: User then Select Springfield Public library from the drop down menu. The Address Book is all the way at the bottom of the list.  It looks like this:
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Missed Chats
Though we try our best to answer every chat and so does the 24/7 Team at Springshare, there are times where the traffic exceeds the staffing available and sometimes patrons don’t get the ability to have a live chat. As a best practice at your library, its advised to check your Missed chats. If you are newer and unfamiliar with this, see the screen shot below. Then just filter by chats by Department (i.e. your institution) This should be done whenever your staff logins, even if they are just staffing your local institution queue.  You can review the quality of service that your patrons are receiving from other librarians in the 24/7 queues. There are times they won’t get a full answer and you may choose to follow up and/or clarify a response they receive or give them answer if no one was available to pick up the chat.  The best practice for keeping track of who goes through these chats is to use tags. You have complete autonomy on the nomenclature that you wish to use for your tags. Please do make sure the tag is unique enough for your institutional use so your stats do not get confused with another institution. ( An example of one being used for this is the” Chemeketa reviewed” tag for Chemeketa Community College. This is also a great way for your institution or I to run reports and provide assessment of services.

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Deleting Transcripts, Transcript Records & Privacy
Please do not delete missed chat. This will completely delete chats and the statistics associated with those chats. These cannot be restored by me or the Springshare Central staff. Once they are deleted, they are gone permanently. As a reminder, the Anwerland Cooperative chats go through privacy scrubbing every 90 days. If you think your institution has need of a different retention schedule, please let me know and we can discuss options.

Training New Staff
If you are training new staff in the upcoming months, please only use tags for adjusting. If a chat is a practice chat, use the practice queue located on the Answerland Staff Toolkit Libguide<https://libguides.osl.state.or.us/answerland/home>.  Please then use the practice tag for the ticket and/or chat.

Reporting a prank, chatbot or abusive patron- We do not ban IP Addresses until I figure out where they are coming from since it could ban chats from entire institutions etc. There is a form on Libstaffer, Report Patron<https://247cooperative.libstaffer.com/form/repeat-patron> but I would also encourage you all to email me when these come up so I can help resolve these issues.

Add New Staff to the Asnwerland listserv
If you would like your staff members added to this listserv, you can email me with their name and email address. Or you can send them to this web form<https://omls.oregon.gov/mailman/listinfo/answerland> link.  I will then be prompted to approve the subscription.  I’m also happy to keep the listserv up to date with anyone who wants to be taken off the listserv. Each person has the ability to cancel their own subscription too.  It’s completely up to you how you wish to distribute information if you just want to forward these updates instead of each staff member getting this. If your organization tends to have issues with receiving emails from outside (like the State Library), it may be easier to have the Answerland Liaison at your library distribute this instead of me. Some institutions have high server security, it can be like breaking into Fort Knox getting emails to some of you, please let me know what will work best.  😊

Let me know what question you have about this information and have a great weekend!

Sincerely,

Jennifer Cox, MLIS (she/her)
Virtual Reference Coordinator, Library Support & Development Services
State Library of Oregon
jennifer.cox at slo.oregon.gov<mailto:jennifer.cox at slo.oregon.gov> | 971-600-4992
www.oregon.gov/library/libraries<https://www.oregon.gov/library/libraries>
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