It is always good to get a feel for what it is like to be a patron on Answerland. I turned on chat on answerland.org for you to try out, test and practice.
1. Sign in to the Answerland website ('sign in as a librarian' in the lower right).
2. Sign into Spark and monitor the practice2 workgroup. Make sure your status is 'available' or 'online'.
3. Go to practice chat on answerland.org. From the 'other pages' menu, choose Practice chat. Submit a question.
We believe that virtual reference offers people the chance to connect to libraries, not just to find materials and get their questions answered, but to build relationships.
In the process of rebuilding this site, we talked to a group of young adults at the Tualatin Public Library, aged 12-18, and asked if they had ever used chat before. They had, on Facebook, with their friends.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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' "
I wanted to make a quick note for anyone who is interested, there used to be a box when you logged into this website for "remember me". I think it was causing problems for some people and making them log in over and over so I disabled it. If the problems don't go away, I'll bring it back.
For now, your login lasts only until you close your browser.
Welcome back to that same old place that we laughed about. The L-net naming team has finally come to a decision, and we've picked a new name, and it is our old name:
Answerland
No name is perfect, but in the end, what is great about the name Answerland is that it champions reference service. It emphasizes the tangible benefit that patrons receive when they ask questions at the library.
