All about tags

Tags are metadata without labels. Imagine online library catalogs, if instead of keeping separate indexes for authors, titles and subjects, we could only access these bits of information through one general index. We're calling this 'tags', but in a library catalog, we called it a keyword index, and in the days of yore we called it a card catalog.

In the context of reference, it is likely that we will use most tags to describe questions. Most tags will be subjects, descriptors, labels, etc. We can also use them to claim questions or refer them to one another, by tagging a question with the name of a library or librarian. And we can use them for whatever else we want.

This is an experiment, but I think tags will be useful for us.

Best Practices

Keep answers within the L-net software rather than using your own library’s email account to answer questions.

This is partly because it is good for us to have a record in the software of the answer the patron receives. Also, the patron's home library has access to the question record and may want to be able to read the answer to know that its patron was well-served.

But the main reason that it's better to use the software to communicate with patrons is because it provides better privacy for our patrons.

In Oregon, email of public employees is public record. Library records are not. By sending patron information over a public employee's email account, the library records become public records. In order to protect our patrons' privacy, we try to keep our reference questions out of our email whenever possible.

For complicated questions, give the patron the option of calling the library or receiving an answer via email follow up.

Librarians sometimes tell the patron to call the library for a quick answer, especially when questions involve circulation records that many of us may not have access to.

Since the patron contacted the library through the chat or email service, the patron may be indicating a preference for electronic-based communication with the librarian. The downside of asking the patron to make a call is that it asks him to repeat his question all over again on the phone. The goal is to move the question, not the patron.

How questions get into the system

Questions get into our system in three ways:

Patrons send e-mail to ask@oregonlibraries.net

www.oregonlibraries.net checks for new mail every 5 minutes. New messages are treated as new questions and are given an open tag, with a few exceptions:

Messages containing hyperlinks are considered spam and are marked unpublished. Administrators (Emily and Caleb) review spam throughout the day, publish any real questions and delete the rest.

If the message's subject header identifies it as a reply to one we sent to them, the message is added to the question transcript.

Patrons fill out our form at www.oregonlibraries.net/ask

All questions sent through our form are given an open tag.

Chat sessions set with the resolution code "Followup"

All chat sessions are tagged with their resolution codes, but if a question is marked 'Followup' it is also given an open tag.

Patrons waiting for their chat click 'leave a message'

Patrons using live chat are told how long they have to wait and are given the option to leave a message. The form sends the question to ask@oregonlibraries.net.  Once patrons click submit, they are sent a confirmation of their question, using the template at www.oregonlibraries.net/templates/new.

Questions that originated as chat questions have a balloon icon.  Questions sent to L-net as email questions have an envelope icon.

How to find out about new questions

You can find out about new questions by visiting our list of open questions, www.oregonlibraries.net/ask/answer/open.  You can also go to www.oregonlibraries.net/ask/answer/my to see a list of all the questions that are included in your "Good Morning from L-net email".

Questions are sorted by their last updated time. The questions that have been worked on least recently are shown first. This reflects L-net's priority of answering questions in the order they arrive.

At the top of the page a tag list shows the tags on all of the currently open questions.  Click on any of the tags to limit the list to questions that have that tag.

It is easy to check a website, but it may not be easy to remember to do it, so you have a few other options.

You may sign up for e-mail notifications by editing your preferences. Click "My account", then "Edit" and then "Notifications".

To turn notifications on or off, check or uncheck the box labeled "Yes, please send me notifications of new questions".

Set whether you want to receive notifications of questions based on their tags, the words in the question, or both.

Finally, choose a few tags or words to match against. Separate them by commas.

Different librarians may tag a question for your library using a variety of different tags. It's a good idea to set up your alerts so that you will receive notifications for all the variations of your library's name that you can think of. So Beaverton City librarians may set up their notifications for Beaverton, Beaverton City Library, BCL.

Some librarians are also setting up their accounts to be alerted to subject words, such as history, art, biology, etc.

The notifications that you set up for yourself will generate a "Good morning from L-net" email message every morning alerting you to questions you may need to answer.

If you'd prefer, you can get alerts of activity on your question by IM instead of e-mail.

This is helpful if you are on Spark all day anyway and like to respond to patrons right away. Log into the website, and click 'my account' and then 'edit'. Scroll down to 'Messaging and Notifications settings' and set 'Default send method' to 'XMPP'. Alerts for new questions will come over IM instead of e-mail. Alerts for old questions and the daily 'good morning' messages will continue to arrive by e-mail.

If you don’t already have an account, follow these steps to create an account.

1. Visit www.oregonlibraries.net/user/register to create an account.

2. Wait for Caleb or Emily to confirm your account.

3. Log in to your account at http://www.oregonlibraries.net/user/login.

4. Click ‘Edit’ and follow the steps above to set up notifications.

5. In the ‘account settings’ section, you can upload a picture of yourself (or whoever you want to be online). Be sure to submit any changes by scrolling to the bottom and clicking the button there.

6. In the ‘personal information’ section, tell us about yourself. You don’t have to fill out every field. If there’s something you’d like to say that doesn’t seem like it has a place, just let Caleb know and he'll add it in. Be sure to click submit at the bottom.

7. Your profile will be available at www.oregonlibraries.net/librarians.  Someday we hope to make it easy for patrons to see this page.

8. If several librarians at a library would like to access a shared email account, we can set up a profile for the library rather than individual profiles.

You may also subscribe to an RSS feed for any tag in the system. You may want to subscribe to multiple feeds. The URL for a feed is the same as the URL for a list of questions, only replace 'answer' with 'feed'.

For example: List of questions tagged 'Deschutes': http://oregonlibraries.net/ask/answer/deschutes

RSS feed for questions tagged 'Deschutes':

http://oregonlibraries.net/ask/feed/deschutes

Feeds contain only the time a question was sent, a link to the question, and any additional tags. They do not contain the text of the questions themselves or information about the patron.

Question statuses

Questions may have one of two statuses:

Open questions are new or have recently received a reply from a patron or a referred librarian.

Closed questions are completed or are recent chat sessions not coded for follow-up.

You may open or close a question by using the button to change the status.

These statuses work like tags for generating question lists and feeds, but are controlled by the system.

Searching e-mail and followup questions

You can search e-mail and followup questions. Question lists by tag can also be searched. The Search this site search box, above the left-hand sidebar, searches the entire contents of www.oregonlibraries.net. 

To search transcripts only, use the advanced search and limit to L-net questions.

A word of warning: only words in the original question or chat transcript are currently indexed. Words in your answers, requests for clarifications, comments and other notes are excluded.

You can use the Tag cloud, http://www.oregonlibraries.net/ask/cloud, to find questions with specific tags.

Working with a question

When you work on a question, notice the information about the patron and the transcript history so far. Any information the patron submitted with the question and the transcript of the conversation so far will be included.

Look for comments from other librarians at the bottom of the record. Does someone say they are working on it already? If so, you should contribute by adding comments, not by sending an answer yourself.

Look also for tags with people's names in them. These may also indicate that a particular person is working on the question.

Add lots of comments and tags yourself to avoid confusion.

Organize questions by adding tags to them. Scroll down to the sections labeled All Tags and My tags.

To add a tag, enter words in the 'My tags' box, separated by commas, and either hit 'return' or click 'Add'.

Tags may only be removed by the person that created them.

A tag cloud is at http://www.oregonlibraries.net/ask/cloud and includes all tags given to questions, open and closed.

You are free to tag questions with whatever terms you see fit - subjects, sources, or whatever you want.

One convention we've discussed so far is that you may tag a question with your name to indicate that you are working on it.

To assign a question to a specific library, either your own or another L-net partner library, use the 'library tag' drop-down menu to select a library.  If you don't see your desired library listed, choose 'L-net staff' and leave a comment. Clear the 'library tag' by choosing 'any library'.  To remove a library tag, choose 'any library'.

A good way to contribute to answers without doing the answering is to leave Staff comments on questions.

For example, if you start to work on a question, you might just comment what sources you checked. If you are working on something but are stumped, other librarians can suggest sources or methods.

To send an answer or request clarification from the patron, enter your answer in the big text box and choose either 'Answer' or 'Request Clarification'.

You may also save a partial answer by selecting 'Draft'.  If the text box is not empty, someone else has saved a draft of an answer already.

If you choose 'Answer', drafts will be deleted, the answer will be sent, and the question's status will be set to 'closed'.

The message to the patron will use a template based on www.oregonlibraries.net/templates/answer.

If you choose 'Request clarification', a message will be sent to the patron but the question's status will remain open.

The message to the patron will use a template based on www.oregonlibraries.net/templates/clarification.

If you choose 'Draft', nothing is sent to the patron and the question's status isn't changed. It doesn't hurt to save drafts often while you are working on an involved question.

If more than one person is working on a question at the same time, both answers or clarifications are sent. However, only the most recent draft will display in the text box.

If you choose 'Referral', an e-mail will be sent to the e-mail address you specify with the text of the original question and your message in the 'Answer' field. The recipient of the referral will not receive a copy of the chat transcript or see the patron's email address.

The referral will use a template based on www.oregonlibraries.net/templates/referral.

When that person replies, you will need to copy and paste the answer into the answer box. You may also need to edit the response since librarians often phrase answers differently when they are speaking to one another than they do when they are speaking to a patron. When your answer is ready to go, click 'Send message' to send the answer to the patron.

By default, you will be notified when the patron or referee replies to your clarification, answer, note or referral. You may unsubscribe from a question if you would not like to receive this notification.

If you choose ‘Note’ you can send a message to the patron while leaving the status of the question open. You might want to send a note if you have a very difficult question that would take more than a day or two to research. In that case, you might just want to drop the patron a note saying that you're working on the question, but that there may be a slight delay before the patron receives an answer. You might also use this if you just want to tell the patron that you're consulting with other librarians or referring the question to another library. That might also involve a delay in getting the patron an answer.

If you choose 'Staff comment', your message will not be sent to the patron at all, and only librarians will be able to read it.

If you click on the 'Set to Closed’ button the status of the question will change to closed. You may want to just close a question if it is a duplicate question or if it appears that the question was answered in chat and it was given a followup resolution code in error.

If you click on the ‘Mark as spam’, the question status will change to closed and will be deleted soon after being marked as spam. Most spam gets trapped before it gets into the e-mail software, but use this anytime you see a question that is clearly spam.

If you choose ‘Open this question’ a closed question’s status will change to open and the question will appear in the list of open questions.

If you choose ‘Update patron's email address’, copy the patron's address from its location in the transcript and paste it into the box. Click on the change button. The patron's email address will display at the top of the record right where it is supposed to be.

Attachments

You can add an attachment to send to a patron if you are sending an Answer, Request for clarification, Note to the patron, or if you are Referring the Question outside of L-net. You can attach as many files as you want, and each one can be up to 5 megabytes.

To attach a file, scroll to the File Attachments link, and click it to reveal the attachment form. Click the Browse... button to find your file and Attach to attach it.

Enter your message to the patron in the 'Message' box and choose what action to take as usual. If you need to send more than one attachment, just do this again with the second file.

Click 'Send Message'. Your attachment will appear as part of your message in the transcript. The attachment has been sent to the patron.