Blogs

Thanks to the diligence of many librarians recently, and especially Michael Bowman at Portland State University and Laura Orr at the Washington County Law Library, I was finally able to track down and squash a bug that had been causing patrons problems for at least three months.

In one patron's words,

[the librarian] never answered my question, he just left the chat.. great survice this place is....

Another, who replied to a transcript after her chat session said,

The chat never worked.

Something was happening where the patron would seem to be connected but couldn't see messages on the patron's screen.

I tried tracking down this problem by comparing the users' browsers, but it was a different one every time. I tried communicating with patrons who it was happening to, but didn't get very far. I tried ensuring that JavaScript was enabled before connecting patrons, but it still happened.

As it turned out, the one place I didn't look was in the question itself. Before our software upgrade on November 16th of last year, I had tested the chat by submitting a question with every character on the keyboard:

`~1!2@3#4$5%6^7&8*9(0)-_=+QqWwEeRrTtYyUuIiOoPp{[}]|\AaSsDdFfGgHhJjKkLl:;"'ZzXxCcVvBbNnMm,,>.?/

Only I forgot to test the enter key. Patrons who wrote long questions and broke up their thoughts into multiple lines, and patrons who just happened to hit enter somewhere in their question, even at the end, had the problem described above. All they saw was a blank chat screen, even when the librarian sent messages.

When we upgraded the software, we added a feature for the patron's question to display on their screen and ours. When the question had a line break, this feature broke and stopped the whole chat.

Oops, grr, d'oh, and phew.

The problem is fixed now, for both the regular L-net chat and L-net Local. Here is a look at some of the damage that may have been done:

Chatssince 11/16/2009: 7,599
That include a line break in the question: 1,648
Probable technical problems: 22%

I'm going to keep paying attention to this issue, but for now am pleased that more patrons will get a good experience from L-net.

Yesterday I had the chance to use Oregon Health Go Local on L-net. Oregon Health Go Local was developed by OHSU and the National Library of Medicine to provide resources for citizens and patients in Oregon to find health resources and services.

The question I had on chat was "I need to find a walk-in clinic". I went to the Oregon Health Go Local website and browsed until I found a list of locations in the patron's area. It was more difficult than I would have liked. A map of where the facilities were and their hours would have helped us both, but through patience, we eventually found a clinic that was convenient to the patron.

Afterwards, I IM'd a little bit with Emily Ford, who was one of the project staff for Oregon Health Go Local. You may remember that she gave a lightning talk about it at the 2009 Oregon Virtual Reference Summit.

She immediately recalled the subject heading I could have used to find the right clinic - 'Ambulatory Care Centers' - which of course now that I know the term it makes perfect sense. She also sent me a nifty flier about using the site which you will find attached.

One recommendation in the flier is to spend a few minutes browsing the site's controlled vocabulary. I learned my lesson, and will now heed that advice. Check out the providers and facilities and the services for specific health issues.

Have you had a session recently where the patron's question shows up again near the end of the chat? Here is an example:

If you see this happening now and then, it is not a bug you need to worry about (if you see it a lot, please let me or Emily know).

Two of the things that changed when we upgraded our software November 16th were that we now send the patron's initial question as part of the chat when the session is initiated and that the patron is no longer disconnected when they hit their browser's back button.

The effect is that if they do hit their browser's back or refresh button, the browser thinks it is connecting for the first time and sends the initial question again. The chat transcript is erased from the patron's screen, which can sometimes cause some frantic back-button or refresh button pressing.

My guess is that the 'end chat' button is just not obvious enough for some patrons. We should address this with usability testing.

We may also be able to keep the patron's transcript from disappearing from their screen, but I'd want to do it in a way that didn't create a privacy problem for people using shared computers. There should be no way for someone else to get back to your finished session.

Kim Leeder at In the Library with the Lead Pipe posted an article a few weeks ago on the topic of Vision and Visionaries. As part of her introduction, she compares two blog posts by school librarians in Georgia, each interviewing their respective students on the topic of "What makes a library a library?"

One of the librarians is at a high school.

The other is at an elementary school that goes up to grade 5 (download huge file with students talking and a very interesting slideshow).

Leeder notes that the elementary students are focused on resources and the high school students were focused on atmosphere and social interactions. You can read the rest of her summary if you want, but I hope you'll check out the original sources. It is always interesting to hear what patrons have to say.

I don't think these voices represent the way every high school or elementary school student thinks about and uses libraries, even in Georgia, or even in those schools. If we are willing to believe that the librarians didn't edit much out, and faithfully reported everything they had permission to use, then I think the two sets of student responses shows that distinct groups of people can have distinct different experiences of "library".

I love that Leeder, an academic librarian, uses the mouths of babes to open a discussion of vision in libraries. It's not just that some of those kids are going to be college students someday - sure, sure, I believe the children are the future - but rather, that each person's experience with libraries today, and in the future, is heavily influenced by their personal history with libraries: did the library help them in some way? Were staff friendly? Were they made to feel that they belonged?

Will a student who comes to our virtual reference serivce from a library that is full of resources have a different experience than one who comes to us from a library that is a place where people quietly hang out? Are we prepared to serve both students well?

A while ago, many of you helped us out by participating in a cardsorting activity.

I created slips of paper with the names of some frequently used pages on this site and asked you to categorize them. At the time, I aggregated the results and came up with a categorization scheme that seemed to work for a lot of people.

Today I finished applying that scheme to the left-hand menus on this site.

The top menu is things that patrons, libraries and schools might be interested in. The category here was 'public site for patrons'.

If you are logged in, the next link is 'The questions', which includes the current open questions list as well as links to the Buzz (recent questions) and resources for answering questions and working with patrons.

After that is "Technical help", which includes that, as well as statistics and links to general support and documents for L-net.

This is all far from perfect and far from done. There are several pages and documents that aren't represented in the navigation, and we've got to add them. We've also got to test the current set-up to see how well it is working.