I've been working on how to display transcripts that patrons want to share. The first one is up at www.oregonlibraries.net/archive/124654.
I am thrilled that the patron was willing to share this interaction. Not only does the librarian do a great job, but in thinking about what kinds of questions we want to highlight, I decided that one of the things we want is to put out content that is going to attract our patrons when they are searching the internet, ie, questions about Oregon and things of interest to Oregonians.
I did my best to make the transcript look as much like our chat as possible. I am sort of enjoying this display more than the regular 'buzz' version (compare to www.oregonlibraries.net/ask/124654) - what do you think?
One of the issues is that the style of our site has nothing to do with our chat interface, so the fonts are smaller. I think it will soon be time to redesign our site.
Another issue is, if we are removing screen names, what do we call people? Do patrons know they are called 'patrons'? I played with calling the patron 'you', 'person', and 'patron', but decided on 'anonymous'. I decided to call the librarian 'librarian', though their regular screen name would probably do fine.
All of this would be moot if we weren't moderating the display of personal information. Of course patrons can be anonymous, but if they want to have a name, and if they want their name to be archived, that's okay too. And wouldn't it be nice to give credit to the actual librarian?
I'm trying to think what we can add to the basic archived-transcript screen:
- A link to ask a new question?
- a block listing extracted resources/URLs used in the transcript?
- an optional "answer" summary? (this means more work)
- comments
And for a generic 'archive' page:
- Most recent questions
- Search
- RSS feed
how are you moderating
how are you moderating sessions to determine if they were polite and/or of use? is there something on the librarian end that says "yes, share" after the customer's already given their opt-in?
Our database has two "share"
Our database has two "share" fields, one for what the patron said and one for our decision to share or not.
Each day (or so), I generate a list of questions that the patron is willing to share but haven't had a decision added yet. I then look at each transcript and decide to share or not using the criteria above, and scrub by hand if needed.
Since switching software, we have a lot of disconnects, so those are easily culled for not being helpful.
I like to think of this as a temporary workflow. We'll see!
We haven't involved librarians in this process. I am willing to remove a conversation if a librarian has a good reason, but I believe reference conversations belong to the people initiating them.
It's sort of a double standard for me to choose what to share and what not to, and then not give that same power to the librarians who are actually part of the conversations. If we can come up with a good mechanism for giving librarians control, we'll add it.
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