This is just a duplication of a message I sent to our e-mail discussion list.

In short: Oregon librarians are awesome. You are all doing a great job answering questions under some pretty stormy conditions.

Traffic on our chat service has seemed very slow to us all, but I finally crunched some numbers and figured out that we are getting about 25% more chat requests than we were a week ago. Some of these may be tests (I tried to eliminate as many as I could), but I am confident that the software is working, even in Beaverton. Based on the transcripts I am seeing, we aren't getting nearly as many errors as we did in practice and in trainings.

For a live snapshot of traffic by the day, see www.oregonlibraries.net/dashboard.

Part of the reason that it seems slow is that we are all used to the constant questions from the 24/7 cooperative. OCLC QuestionPoint handles just about a million questions per year (not all of them in chat), and we hope to have 25,000 (mostly in chat). So if it seemed 40 times busier last week, that's why.

Another reason it seems slower is that just because we had 84 questions yesterday doesn't mean we had 84 chats. Some were e-mail questions, and some were patrons that gave up and left after waiting. I am going to see if I can calculate this exactly in the next couple of days, if the dust clears a bit. Whatever the real numbers are, I know we'll get better at answering all of our patrons' questions - its only been two days and most of us haven't even taken a question yet.