Friday, October 29, 2010

Ask-A-Librarian

Have you seen the new Ask-A-Librarian button on our website? It's plastered pretty much everywhere. It looks like this most of the time:
askalibrarian 

When you click on it, it prompts you to enter a name and question, and then we answer it through a live chat. It's pretty neat, really, and we get a lot of traffic this way. 
One thing I like to point out when I tell classes about this service: It really is us! During the highest traffic hours during the day, a USF librarian is sitting in the chat room. When I do my chat hour on Tuesdays, I usually get 5-6 questions. That might not sound like a lot, but chat questions take longer to answer than email or phone questions, so it keeps me pretty busy.

Beginning on October 25th, we started offering text messages as one of the ways you can contact us. There is a dedicated USF number for our texts, and we'll receive it just like an email question. When we reply, it will automatically be sent to you as a text. I'm pretty excited to see how it works out - it sounds like a really great idea, but sometimes it takes a while for stuff like this to catch on.

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