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SpringyNews: Maximize Engagement

June 2016

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The UN Library Maximizes Engagement with Minimal Effort

How did the United Nations HQ Librarians answer 20,000 questions in one month? Well, using their LibAnswers Ask DAG service - that's how!  We sat down, virtually speaking, with Joelle Sciboz from the UN Library to get the low down on how they're using LibAnswers to increase the library's presence while minimizing staff efforts. 
Check-out what they shared, below.


Tell us about your ASK DAG service!

ASKDAG United Nations Library

Image Courtesy of United Nations Library Tumblr

Ask DAG was launched in 2013 by the Dag Hammarskjöld Library in New York. The Library was named after the Second Secretary-General of the United Nations who was a big supporter of libraries. It is our small homage to him that we named our site Ask DAG.

Located at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, the Library primarily serves delegates of Permanent Missions and UN Secretariat staff. At the same time we receive questions from the general public, mostly students, lawyers, researchers and librarians, from all corners of the world. The challenge for the Library is to be able to maintain an effective and targeted service for our core clients, while being virtually accessible and visible to a wider audience.

Ask DAG enables us to do that!

The challenge for the Library is to be able to maintain an effective and targeted service for our core clients, while being virtually accessible and visible to a wider audience.


How has using LibAnswers for your Ask DAG service enabled you to maximize engagement with minimal effort?

We used to receive recurrent questions from internal and external clients. Now we are able to publish these questions (as FAQs) and reach out to people that would not even think of contacting us. Ask DAG is well referenced by search engines, so people now find our answers in Google.

As an example, we used to be asked at least once a week about UN documents citation. Last month, this question was viewed more than 7000 times.

Librarians often hear their relevance questioned.  « Who needs a library when you can find answers in the Internet? » With Ask DAG, we made UN librarians’ knowledge and expertise about the organization readily available to the global community.

This is even more important when the question is of a legal or political nature. We have to be careful when we decide to publish an answer. We have to make sure that we provide an unbiased answer to legitimate questions.  For instance, « are UN resolutions binding? » This is a complicated legal question with no simple answer. Our answer is typical librarian!

We refer people to source material that reflects different points of view and allow them to come to their own conclusions. Our efforts are not always appreciated…

Was this helpful screenshot

In one month, you answered 20,000 questions. Tell us about that!

By making our answers available online, we sometimes answer questions that people don’t even know they have. Each time someone gets their answer from the public site, they don’t need to contact us – which saves us from repeating the same answer over and over again and saves them from waiting for us to respond (though we are pretty quick).

From our point of view, we answered a question! Even if they need additional information or have a completely different question, they now know how they can send a request directly to us, which is the beauty of Ask DAG!

...saves us from repeating the same answer over and over again and saves them from waiting for us to respond (though we are pretty quick).

As a matter of fact we reached over 30,000 views in March 2016! Each year, I think the number of views will stabilize, but it keeps growing. The whole team is proud of this success!

Ask DAG month over month growth chart

How are you able to serve the needs of multilingual users?

The United Nations has six official languages, and we work in a multilingual environment. We try as much as possible to answer questions in the official language in which they are received.

When the second version of LibAnswers was launched we took advantage of the group feature to publish FAQs by language. Currently we have English, French and Spanish, we are exploring the possibility to expand to Chinese and Russian. The challenge is not only technical. We also have to make sure we have the resources to maintain the database in all languages. The maintenance of the database is really a team effort! We have set up a peer-review process to make sure that all public questions are regularly revised, and that staff learn from one another.

Official Languages


  • Arabic
  • Chinese
  • English
  • French
  • Russian
  • Spanish