Policies and Procedures for L-net Local

Policies

L-net Local is intended to be a tool for you to provide virtual reference service to your community. How you provide that service is up to you.

L-net's procedures and policies attempt to provide the best possible service to a diverse group of patrons. They are based on professional communication in the virtual reference field, including peer-reviewed research and refereed papers, attending conferences and informal communication with our peers.

However, one size does not fit all. You are the best person to decide how to provide service to your community. We are happy to lend our experience and document library but do not insist you follow all of L-net's policies.

Current exceptions

L-net's privacy policy applies to L-net local as well: the patron's personal information is removed from the chat server in Ohio as well as the L-net website after 7 days, but a scrubbed version of the transcript is kept.

Customizations to this policy are not currently available. If you would like to use a different privacy policy, please talk to L-net staff.

Procedures

As with policies, how you staff and manage the workflow for your L-net Local service is up to you. At the same time, all of L-net's tools are available to you, including the Follow-up/e-mail software.

Resolution codes

You are welcome to use L-net's resolution codes, or not, as you see fit. In the future, we expect you will be able to define which codes are available and which are not. They may be helpful for statistics, but only two of them do anything inside the software.

The Follow-up code will enter the patron's question into our follow-up system.

If you use the Follow-up resolution code but aren't going to follow up through L-net, just close the question and leave a comment about what you are doing so that other L-net librarians don't contact the patron.

The Prank only works on the regular L-net service. Chats from the patron within the next hour will be sent to a special queue. For more information, see two blog posts about it, "queues" and "followup on pranks".

Follow-up using your local e-mail account

If you would like to ignore the L-net e-mail and follow-up system send the patron e-mail yourself, and you are a public institution we recommend using a common reference e-mail address to answer the patron. This helps separate e-mails that may be exempt from public records requests (like library transactions) from record that are not exempt (like your e-mail)