Just now I made public a few self-service tools for patrons to find answers to their questions.
Find is a Google Custom Search Engine that uses Google's engine to search websites or pages that we have sent to patrons more than once in the last four years.
The QuestionPoint Global Knowledge Base is a repository of questions and answers contributed by librarians on the QuestionPoint service. OCLC offers directions for how to allow patrons to search it.
I combined the two tools into one search box with a little JavaScript and put the search box for Find/QPKB on our front page, our about pages, and the default Find page.
The point of all this is to allow patrons to take advantage of the answers we give without having to ask us new questions. Patrons might be too shy, too cool, or too impatient to wait for an answer to a new question. Similarly, librarians might be too busy, like when we have a class visit.
More than that, it was last month at the Collaborative Virtual Reference symposium where Kathleen Kern from the University of Illinois told me that we couldn't be afraid of unmediated reference. Or something like that.
I think the main thing that we do is provide one-on-one, confidential reference service, online in our case, but it occurs to us that this may not be what everyone wants. What they do want, we should find out more scientifically, but until then, we'll watch and see what people search for.
