In this Issue:
Tailor Your LibAnswers System:
Using Groups & Queues
Cooking holiday dinners can be difficult. Remembering cousin Tim's peanut allergy. Aunt Fran's hatred of onions. And Uncle Bob's love of everything deep-fried. Tailoring your menu to everyone's needs is no mean feat. How do you address guests' wants in just one meal?
Well, your patrons are just like Uncle Bob, Aunt Fran, and cousin Tim - minus the familial relationship. They want to ask questions of the library in the way that is best suited for them. Thankfully, providing tailored virtual reference within a single LibAnswers system couldn't be easier!
Queues: Reduce the Noise
With LibAnswers v2, you can route incoming reference questions to specific departments or people and reduce the signal-to-noise ratio with queues. All transactions are routed into one LibAnswers system. From here, set up which librarians have access to and get notifications from specific queues.
Just imagine, a patron emails ill@library.edu, inquiring about an interlibrary loan request. That email gets routed into your ILL Queue, and your interlibrary loan specialist gets an alert that there is an incoming ILL request. She logs into LibAnswers, answers the patron, and voila - all parties are satisfied, with statistics to boot. Repeat this scenario for all other library departments!
Each queue comes with its own:
- Incoming Email Address
- Question Submission Form
- SMS Number
- Twitter Handle Integration
Patrons can tailor their reference questions to specific departments, and you can fight information overload all while increasing efficiency! Your librarians and patrons will be grateful.
FAQ Groups for your User Groups
If you're in an academic library, you're working with students, faculty, and staff. Public libraries have adult patrons, child users, and more. School Librarians provide resources for students, teachers, administrators, and parents. Hospital libraries work with doctors, nurses, administrators, other care-givers, and patients. Bottom-line, no matter your library, you're working with diverse groups that have diverse needs.
Organize your FAQs by user demographic so users will only see the FAQs that pertain to them!
How is that possible?
LibAnswers v2 allows you to create an unlimited number of FAQ groups. Tailor your FAQs to your users! Each FAQ group comes with:
- Customizable Look & Feel - Each group gets its own homepage, banner, custom look and feel, etc.
- Topical Organization - Create customizable topic organizations for each group! So your 'For Students' group might contain FAQ topics like E-Reserves, Citing Resources, Writing a Reseach Paper, while your 'For Faculty' group would contain FAQs tailored for them.
- Visibility Setting - Our recent LibAnswers v2 update gives you four visibility options, from public FAQs, to internal, to the ability to create a staff intranet.
