How to find out about new questions
There are three main ways to find out about new questions: by visiting the open questions list, by setting up e-mail notifications, and if you have done that, by checking your e-mail regularly.
1. Visit the open questions list
There are always questions being worked on, and many that could user your help. Check the open questions list at www.oregonlibraries.net/ask/answer/open.
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.
2. Sign up for e-mail notifications
L-net can e-mail you when there is a question you might be interested in, or when someone adds a response (an answer, a comment, a note) to a question you started with in chat.
To edit your settings, click "My account", then "Edit" and then "Notifications".
To get an e-mail when someone adds an answer, comment, clarification, note or otherwise responds to your chat, check the box for "Notify me of responses to my chats".
To turn notifications for new questions 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.
Dont' forget to save!
3. Check your e-mail regularly
When a question arrives that matches your settings, you'll get an e-mail letting you know about the question.
If you have set up e-mail notifications and are working on any questions, you will receive an e-mail every morning with the subject 'Good Morning from L-net'. The questions listed here will be the same ones listed at the 'My open questions' page, www.oregonlibraries.net/ask/answer/my.
Whenever someone adds to one of your questions, or when a patron replies, you'll receive an e-mail. This helps us answer in a timely way.
Stopping notifications for a question
The easiest way to stop notifications coming for a particular question is to visit the question page, scroll to the bottom and click the link for 'Unsubscribe from: this post'.
You can also manage all of the questions you are set up to receive notifcations about - 'Subscriptions' - by clicking that tab in your user account.
Alternative: get notifications in Spark IM instead of by e-mail
If you'd prefer, you can get alerts of activity on your question by IM instead of e-mail. If you only log into Spark for your shifts, this is not a good idea.
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 'Spark IM'.
Alerts for new questions will come over IM instead of e-mail. Alerts for old questions and the daily 'Good Morning from L-net' messages will continue to arrive by e-mail.
Creating an account on www.oregonlibraries.net
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.