AskWiChat Support Page

The Big Table
Schedule Grid
Policies, Procedures and General Tricks
Reports

1) Cleaning up
2) Referring/Transferring Qs
3) Setting Inst IDs
4) Setting to show your library ID
5) Create "MyScripts"
6) Help
7) Best Practices Manual

1) Cleaning up.... delete v. closed

We'll be conducting our Chat in a shared environment. Therefore it's critical that folks "clean up after themselves". This means when you've done all you can with a Chat session question you need to:
a) Move it on to someone else (see below).
b) Move it to "Closed" to wait for follow up or for consideration for the Knowledge Base, and make sure to delete your really finished questions from the Closed queue. Although most questions will start and end with the chat session, the automatic appearance of a chat transcript in the email queue allows a lot of power for follow up and ongoing reference work with patrons.
c) Delete the sucker.

A good Rule of thumb, everyone needs to be responsible for their own questions. As the all powerful system administrator I can of course go through and delete everything in sight. However that might not be the best idea when you're still be in sustained conversation with a patron. If we don't keep the house tidy then the queues of requests could get ugly, requiring me to massively clean house. I hope our experience will allow us to develop more specific guidelines over the next couple of months, but for now "try to keep it neat".

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2) Referring/Transferring Qs to other libraries

You lucky ducks, I've given all of your librarian accounts "Admin" powers. Sort of. I've given you these Admin powers specifically so that everyone can easily route questions they've started to other libraries as needed. These powers also in theory allow you change the AskWisconsin institution scripts and some other settings. Please don't. There's more on scripts below.

So how can you use the ability to transfer questions? Let's say you start a chat session that really should be moved to another library for one reason or another. You stop the chat, telling the patron that you are moving the reference work to email and that a reference librarian from XXX library will get back to them soon (say 24 hours or so depending on weekends etc). You might also want to double check their email address. Go to the Active Question Queue and find the transcript for that chat and open it.



Note the Assign to: section. Use the drop down to choose the Library and then click the Assign to: button. This question then becomes one of that libraries questions. Plus an email message is sent to that libraries contact email address telling them a message has been assigned to them.



Clicking on the My Questions menu bar option shows each logged on library the active questions that they need to work on.

A major work issue is everyone should log onto our shared QuestionPoint space at least daily to monitor for questions routed to them, and to clean up and work on ongoing questions that have moved to email. This shouldn't take much time. I think one possible way to handle it would be to make it part of your daily email reference chores along with checking your QuestionPoint contact email account.

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3) Setting patron web pages, Inst ID for email v. Inst ID <10317> for Shared Chat

This is the how to set up your patron access web pages for the whole chat vs. email process. You need to place the "library institution id" into the correct place of your web page scripts. We went through this during the set up training months ago, and everyone got it down right for your own libraries. So everyone should have their patrons web pages directing their patrons queries to their own libraries specific QuestionPoint area. Now we need to make sure you're all set up for the split method we'll be using in order to have shared chat. This involves changing the Institution ID number in your patron web page for Chat. The particular part of the html script appears as below.

<!-- Begin library hidden input field -->
<!-- Replace the value attribute "1" with your library's Ask a Librarian institution ID, supplied by OCLC, in the library hidden input field -->
<input type=hidden name="library" value="10317">
<!-- End library hidden input field -->

Note the line in blue text. The current value on your web page is probably the number of your institution ID (to find your specific ID number log onto QuestionPoint with your Admin account, the ID number is listed in the upper left corner). This example shows you the number you need to use IN THE CHAT SECTION ONLY. That number is 10317.

If your web person is having problems with this have them contact me. It's much harder to write and explain the process than it is to actually do it. Once done your patron chat sessions will automatically go to our shared area. But your email questions will continue to go to your specific individual library area.

Here's also a web page you can use to get patrons to the AskWI Chat area. You can point you patrons to this generic AskWisconsin Chat page in place of creating your own. Kind of an easy way to get started.

http://lepton.wils.wisc.edu/askwisconsin/askwichatform.html

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4) Setting patron web pages to show your library ID to all Chat Monitor Librarians

This is how you add a few lines of scripting to your patron web page so that when your patron starts a chat session your library ID (see the chart of codes below) is appended to the patrons name in the Chat Monitor display. So all librarians can imediately see which library web site any patron started at.

There are two blocks of code that must be inserted in two separate areas. Please pay close attention to the proper location and text format. It will save you and your web developer time to do it right from the get go.

The first script insert begins in the area that starts:

<!-- Begin script that validates proper text entry in both forms -->

You need to scroll down to find the "checkItChat(form) section. This is especially critical if you have both the Chat form and the Email form on the same web page.

function checkItChat(form)

Finally find the section below and insert the line of blue colored text into your html script, so it looks like the below.

if (emailCheck(email, true)) {
form.chat_name.value = form.chat_name.value + " [" + form.library_code.value + "]";
return true;
}
else {
return false;
}
}

The second script insert starts right after the Institution ID field shown in 3) above:

<INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="library" SIZE="-1" VALUE="10317"> <!-- End library hidden input field -->

Add the text below except where "VALUE="XXXX" enter the 4 letter code for your library in quotes. See the table below for your library code.

<!-- Begin hidden input field for four-letter library identifer. Appended to patron name in chat window and on chat transcript. Change identifier to one of your choice.-->
<INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="library_code" VALUE="XXXX">
<!-- End library identifier field. -->

Library	4 letter code
Appleton	appl
Chippewa Valley Tech	cvtc
DPI (Reference and Loan)	dpi
Madison Area Tech College	matc
LE Phillips (Eau Claire)	phil
UW Green Bay	uwgb
UW Milwaukee	uwml
UW Oshkosh	uwos
UW Whitewater	uwwh
Winnefox (Oshkosh)	winn
WISPALS	wpal
WiLS	wils

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5) Create "MyScripts" to meet your libraries needs

Each QuestionPoint space has two sets of scripts that can be created. One set of 25 scripts is automatically available to every librarian logged in. These are the Institution scripts. The other set of scripts, called MyScripts, are available and unique to individual log ons. Each of our library account log ons can have their own set of 25 predefined MyScripts to use while chatting. I encourage everyone to create a set of MyScripts for their library to use. It's a huge help. Access the MyScripts area from the Questions menu bar. Remember you are creating the MyScripts for all the librarians using your libraries log on. The kinds of scripts you should consider include: hello and welcome, please wait while I search, did I answer your question, thanks for using our service, click on the URL in your chat display and it will open a new browser window with that web page, etc. I'm sure you guys can think of many more. Once again I'm hoping our experiences will help us develop good sets of scripts.

I will be creating a set of Institution scripts for us all to use including information about AskWisconsin. As with all of our policies and procedures, feedback is critical. So let me know what to add and delete and change.

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6) Help

What do I do when the whole QuestionPoint system starts to get slow, or flaky, or worse?

There are two basic procedures that I recommend:
1) Log off QuestionPoint. Close your browser. Restart the Browser and log back in again. Better? This procedure will fix the problem if your PC and Web Browser software are having a irritability fit and refuse to play nicely with Java and Java-script for even one more moment. Amazingly enough this works sometimes. But I'm also telling you to try this because in 2) below they will make you do this procedure before they do anything themselves. So in effect you cut them off at the pass "been there, done that, what now?" you say. Which leads to the next method.
2) Phone the OCLC Help Desk at 1-800-848-5800. They will ask for your 3 letter OCLC code. Make sure you tell them it's a QuestionPoint problem. Again, amazingly enough they can often fix the problem, especially system response time issues have been known to be fixed within 30 minutes or less. BUT.... they can't fix what they don't know about. So pick up the phone and give them a call. You'll be helping to the fix the problem for all the QuestionPoint and AskWisconsin libraries.
3) Chat logging off problems. Because problems like this are intermittent and unpredictable, you might be reluctant to call the support line with each occurrence. Yet the more information the OCLC developers have, the more likely they can get to the root of the problem in a timely manner. For the short term, we offer the web form at the following link as a quick and easy way to report a problem to support. This form will capture necessary troubleshooting information and email the OCLC User and Network Support desk, as well as the product support team at OCLC. You will also receive a copy of the message sent and receive a follow up notifying you that a service request has been opened.

http://questionpoint.org/contacts/forms/support_form.html

Please bookmark this form.

Yeah you could call me but I'm out of the office a lot (helping libraries all over the state <g>) and my first move would be to call the OCLC Help Desk myself. For the fastest, most direct, and most effective response call that Help Desk.

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7) Best Practices Manual

Here's the link to the AskWI Best Practices Manual, developed for originally using the QuestionPoint service.

AskWI Best Practices Manual

In addition here's the 24/7 Reference Collaborative Polices and Procedures Manual.

24/7 Reference Collaborative Polices and Procedures

And finally here's a copy of the PowerPoint slides from Susan McGlamery's talk on the

7 Habits of Highly Effective Virtual Reference Librarians

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Here's a general overview report for the AskWI service since inception. It's in Microsoft Word format.

AskWiStats.doc

The links below will take you to the latest summary report for the AskWI Chat service. They are webpage versions of Excel spreadsheets. If folks need these in a different format let me know. Obviously it would be ideal to only have to produce one format of the reports for everyone. This report is a monthly breakdown of all activity across AskWisconsin for the calendar year 2003.

AskWisconsin Activity Report 2003

To create a good basic overview report of your own email based QuestionPoint reference activity follow these steps.

Log into QuestionPoint using your administration authorization
Go to the Adminitration section of QP
Click on the Reports Button
Choose the History Tab
Choose the Report by Single Institution Radio Button
Choose the Monthly Report of Current Year
Choose All Services
Click Submit

The resulting web display can be exported using the Export Button at the bottom of the report. This displays a text version of the report in a new browser window. Choose Save As from your browser and save as a ".txt" file and choose a "delimiter". The default is a semi-colon. Open a spreadsheet program such as Exel, or a database program such as Access. Use the Open command to get the report ".txt" file you created. Your program should recognize that it's a "delimited" file and will walk you through an import wizard. Make sure the "delimiter" is the one you used when you saved the ".txt" file. Everything else can stay default. It should slam into your program fine and dandy for you to manipulate as needed.

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