Blogs

I posted some of the comprehensive layouts for our new website last friday. Today I received some layouts for the librarian side as well. New is a 'dashboard' page that (we hope) will both make it easy to do what you came to do (answer questions, adjust your schedule) and to explore the service and the people like you who deliver it.

We have fewer screenshots to share because the designers ran out of time, but I think you'll get the idea.

Much of the site - "help", for example, will look like the blog from the patron's side. All of the posts go on one page, and you will be able to limit by category.

Thanks to the Answerland Logo team, Erin Golub, Stuart Levy, Emily Papagni and Kim Read, we now have an image to go with our new (old) identity.

The team tried to find a logo that conveyed that Answerland was about people giving answers to other people, that it was from the library, that it was convenient and authoritative - whew! That's a lot. They worked with a crowdsourcing site, Crowdspring again, and no submission was perfect.

When we showed various designs to patrons and potential patrons, it became clear that people of all ages understand that this logo is "about people".

Meanwhile, I've been working with an information architect and a graphic designer to come up with a new design for the Answerland website. Here is the front page, so far:

One of the main ideas is that there is only one layer of navigation. This will be especially important on the librarian side of things! The site will also gracefully switch to a mobile version, using the responsive web design.

If you're curious as to how the rest of the patron-facing parts of the site, you can download a PDF of the comprehensive layouts below. Look for this website to be live in October, so there is plenty of time to tell me what you think.

So far, the reactions have been quite strong, so don't be afraid to lay it on me.

The L-net quality team awarded two notable transcript awards at the 2012 Oregon Virtual Reference Summit, to Buzzy Nielsen and Alice LaViolette. You can read their transcripts at www.oregonlibraries.net/notable.

Stephanie Debner praises Buzzy Nielsen

In an announcement regarding Buzzy's chat, I am looking for some studies that compare the results of altrusim in studies of kids vs. adults. Any ideas?, the L-net Quality team wrote:

In this transcript, the patron came in looking for studies that compared altruism in adults and in children, to support an experiment that they were doing with a colleague in a fifth grade classroom.  Buzzy conducted an excellent reference interview with the patron throughout the transcript, to ensure that the resources he found fit the patron’s needs.  He started off by directing the patron to the PsycInfo database, available through Multnomah County.  He put some title and abstract information into the chat to give the patron some information to assess for usefulness, while he compiled a list of articles that he emailed to the patron.

When the patron mentioned that they also had access to PSU’s article databases, Buzzy indicated that PSU might have full-text access to some of the articles for which Multnomah County only had citation and abstracts.  Given the PSU connection, Buzzy also suggested some additional databases that the patron might search. He excelled at providing options for follow-up:  he provided the name and contact information for PSU library’s psychology subject expert; he offered to personally follow up with the patron if he had any “Eureka!” ideas; and he put the chat into follow-up status, as a way to connect the patron to someone with subject expertise.

Not only did Buzzy conduct an excellent reference interview and offered options for follow-up, he also was very friendly and human with the patron throughout the interaction.  The Quality Team was very impressed with the “above and beyond” level of service that Buzzy provided to this patron from start to finish.
 

It was a pleasure for the team to award both notable transcripts in front of 80 people last Friday. Alice's chat, world war II info was celebrated in the afternoon lightning talks.

In this transcript, the patron came in looking for information on his great-grandfather and the great-grandfather's service during World WarII as part of a school assignment. Alice asked several clarifying questions to determine if the patron was looking for more general information about World War II, or information more specific to the great-grandfather’s experience.  Using an ancestry database, Alice found images of his WWI and WWII registration cards, which she emailed to the patron.  She provided the patron with information found in the database, to confirm that she had found the correct person, then attempted to find an Oregonian obituary to further confirm the accuracy of the information she had found.  When the patron asked if Alice could find out what battles the ancestor had fought in, she suggested that the patron could request military service records, either by writing to the WWII National Personnel Records Center (for which she provided the address) or requesting them online from the National Archives.  The patron asked for more information about his ancestor, so Alice searched the 1930 Census, where she found out some more information. The patron was able to use this to confirm that all of the information that she had found was about the right person.  At the end of the chat, Alice emailed the transcript to the patron, so he would have all the information, and closed the conversation in a friendly and professional manner.

The Quality Team was impressed with the caliber and amount of resources that Alice used to help the patron and to verify that the information located was correct.  Throughout the interaction, she also provided context for the resources offered, to help the patron understand what he might find useful on the various sites.  She conducted an excellent reference interview, was very responsive to the patron’s requests for more information, and had a professional and approachable demeanor throughout the chat.

I noted also that the person Alice chatted with was doing a school assignment. We talk so much about how librarians turn kids onto reading. Alice managed to turn one on to genealogical research!

Alice LaViolette receives flowers from Barbara O'Neill and Emily Papagni, with Lori Moore

Our service is for people who live, work or go to school in Oregon, but we take questions from out of state as well. It came up that someone had recently fielded a question from Egypt.

How did they find us? Using Google Egypt, of course (www.google.com.eg). They were the 29th person using Google Egypt to use L-net since October 2008.

We don't track IP addresses, but I can look at referring urls to see where people are coming from. Of Google users that submit questions, I found that about 90% of them are in the United States. Egypt ranks at #9:

This is out of 125,510 questions since October 2008, making international Google users 0.8% of our overall traffic.

Last Monday, April 16th, L-net turned 9 years old. L-net lets anyone who lives, works or goes to school in Oregon ask questions by live chat, text messaging or email, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Tuesday, April 10th at 5:51pm, a student at Central Oregon Community College asked the 200,000th question on our statewide reference service:

"Hello, I need some help narrowing a broad topic to a defined research question. my broad topic is 'DNA Fingerprinting' "

In this question, the librarian expertly interviewed the patron and got her ready to start searching for resources for her paper:

So much has changed in 9 years! When we started, we were a handful of libraries offering chat service a few hours a week. We are now open 24/7 through the help of 40 Oregon libraries. Our 200,000th question was answered by Sam, one of our volunteers who give their personal time, a few hours a week, to helping Oregonians get access to authoritative information through libraries.

So much has stayed the same! We are returning to our original name, Answerland, this fall. We are still supported financially by the Oregon State Library and by the hard work and goodwill of innumerable staff at Oregon libraries, who contribute to answering questions, to our advisory board, event planning and other teams, and by referring patrons our way.

And yes, patrons still need help when they are working online, and library workers are still some of the best people to serve them.