There’s a flood of questions on AskLive about this – it’s being investigated. A handy link to point students to is
ICTS’s Current Outages page (courtesy of John Arnold via a transcript of one of said conversations).

Deborah

Thanks to snow and announcements on Library News, Facebook pages, and Learn, AskLive has been very popular over the last few days with 27, 23, and 21 questions respectively. Sometimes we’ve even had 2-4 questions running simultaneously.

Of course at the same time we’re all a bit short-staffed and extra busy, so answering these questions has been spread among fewer people than usual – yesterday one brave soul picked up 7 (a third) of the questions.

So if you find yourself at your desk for a bit (or, especially in the evenings, if the lending desk is sufficiently quiet) it would be great if you could log in to AskLive. Chances are you’ll see some exciting action. 🙂

Deborah

We’ve recently updated the AskLive Guidelines on Camelot – most of it will be the same as you’re used to, but you’ll want to skim it to refresh your memory and for some of the new tweaks, eg our aim to respond to all questions within 10-15 seconds, and clarification on who should answer what kind of question.

If you’ve missed our training sessions, or if you have any lingering questions, please contact Deborah Fitchett or Sara Roberts – either of us is happy to come and work with you one-on-one.

Deborah

Transfers should now be working again, as well as transcripts.

The student-view on Internet Explorer interface is wonky at the moment – they’ll only see one line of the conversation at a time. It’s fine in Firefox (and probably other browsers like Safari, Chrome, etc).

Some people have reported problems with logging in. If you’re still having problems with this (or any other oddities) please contact me – I’m in touch with LibraryH3lp so can forward bug reports to them.

Deborah

Due to a large upgrade (which will ultimately ensure a more stable service) some LibraryH3lp functionality is currently not working:

• transfers are currently not available
• users may show as offline (black circle) even though they’re actually still there
• widgets for individual librarians seem to be not working (but I think groups such as Engineering/Law/etc are okay?) and our pretty AskLive “skin” is temporarily unavailable
• the admin site is offline – this includes transcript functionality

They’re posting updates on Twitter and have a handy Status board (of which the most relevant section for us is the Webchat client).

In terms of a timeline, their blog says:

We’ll spend the rest of the week bringing up the less critical services such as gateways and getting everything re-stabilized and accustomed to load.

The admin site (especially reports) will probably be hit-or-miss most of the week. […]

The great news is that once we’re through this upgrade, we’ll be able to start pushing out new features again. This upgrade will also allow us to re-enable new trial registrations and to provide new regional and private servers. We believe it will be worth it.

Deborah

Reading my RSS feeds sometimes a theme emerges from the chaos – this time it was ways in which academic libraries have collaborated with students to enhance both library services and student learning.

Continue reading Links of interest 2/6/11 – collaborating with students →

A bit of fun: Book Sculptures

Behind the cut – a bunch of reference and webdesign links.

Deborah

Continue reading Links of interest 7/4/2011 →

The interface we’ve been using for AskLive is being phased out by Meebo – it’s already lost its stats features and may disappear any day, so a group of us (Donna, Janette, Erin, Kathryn and me, reporting to Heather) have been working to find a replacement.

We’ve settled on LibraryH3lp, which was created by a librarian and a programmer, and comes extremely highly recommended. It allows greater privacy for patrons, doesn’t demand a name/age/gender before they can ask a question, has a louder alert sound, lets any number of librarians log in at once, and lets us transfer a chat (with the full transcript) between librarians.

It’s also just as easy to use as the Meebo interface – staff just need a short orientation to the new layout and introduction to the new transfer feature.

For the first two weeks of term, we’ll be guaranteeing AskLive coverage:

• 5-9 Mon-Thurs
• 5-6 Friday
• 1-5 Sat-Sun

(Staff can also test/practice monitoring it during the day if they want – whenever a staff member is logged in, the service will be live so if we receive questions then we’ll answer them; there just won’t be a guarantee that we’ll be there.) This will let us assess how things are going.

From the 3rd week onwards we’ll have AskLive open during all library hours (and will promote it more thoroughly). LibraryH3lp’s new features will let us try abandoning the roster system and instead:

• if you’re working at your desk, log in to LibraryH3lp
• to take a call coming through, answer with a quick greeting (both to assure the student you’re there and to ‘claim’ the question so no other staff answer it)
• when you leave your desk, check the contacts list to be sure that at least one other person is still available (with all public service staff, and any other interested staff, monitoring, probability alone should ensure this – otherwise arrange for someone else to log in), and then mark yourself away or logout.

Donna’s put up some simple instructions on Camelot, and there are people in each branch who can train you as time allows over the next couple of weeks.

Please comment/email/IM me with any questions!

Deborah

We’re open at our normal entrance again, and it’s shiny! Photos at on Facebook.

Deborah