News from the QP Users Council (Full Text Search?)

Joe and I are both on the QuestionPoint Users Council and the 24/7 Advisory Board. The Users Council acts as the liaison between QuestionPoint and you guys- the folks that use the software. The Advisory Board exists to discuss issues, policies, etc regarding the 24/7 Reference Cooperative. Both groups meet about monthly.

Today I had a Users Council Meeting and as I was jotting down notes as people talked it occurred to me that we don't share the outcomes of these meetings with you guys on a regular basis. So here it is- the first update on the QuestionPoint Users Council.

QuestionPoint Events @ ALA Annual

• Best Practices Reference Program
  Saturday June 28th @ 1.30pm in the Convention Center Room 207D
  Panelists Julie Strange; Beth Cackowski of New Jersey's QandANJ; and Mark Beatty of AskAway Wisconsin will be talking about what makes a successful virtual reference service. Topics include promotion, quality, training, management, sustainability, recruitment, and more.


• User Group Meeting
  Sunday June 29th @ 1.30pm in the Embassy Suites South Ballroom, Salon C.

Exciting News from the QuestionPoint Product Team
The Qwidget is currently in "production preview" mode, where it was released for folks to play with it and give feedback to the product team. It should be in "finished" version by the next install in December. They are looking into testing w/ social networking sites like facebook and MySpace. The hold up there is that especially with MySpace, you can't just drop a chunk of code (like the widget) into their site and have it work, you have to develop apps using their api.

There was a lively discussion about QuestionPoint having the ability to allow individual institutions to monitor their own queue. This way, libraries can monitor chat above and beyond their AskUsNow! or Cooperative hours and be able to chat with their customers, never seeing people from other institutions like you would if you were monitoring the MDAsk Public queue, for instance. Allowing local librarians to monitor for their local customers would also take a strain off the 24/7 Reference Coop and I think we would see quality rise and customers happier.

QuestionPoint is still poking around in the area of "integration with commercial IM" but there is a shift from living everywhere to the embedded librarian, letting folks embed the things that are important to them into the spaces they live online. There may sooner than later come a time where we can give folks the code chunk for the widget and say, "embed this in the environment where you live and we'll always be there when you need us." This would take things another step forward and instead of customers having to do to Y/OUR Facebook page or Y/OUR website, we would live in theirs.

Upcoming Developments w/ Major Install 2 (December)
Form Manager Phase 3 includes the ability to manage your chat forms. They are currently figuring out how this works in a state-wide/coop environment where we'd want the chat forms to be the same to have a consistent brand.

Probably the most exciting thing to hear about during the meeting (and part of the title for this post) was Search for Questions/Answers. QuestionPoint is looking into implementing a full text search ability for all sessions within 90 days (those sessions currently available in the ASK / Review Transcripts section). I now notice I am unsure if this search feature would appear in the back-end QuestionPoint or the Chat Monitor, but having this structure built would allow for things like advanced query systems that would allow for things like A List Of Sessions This Email Recently Had. This would help a lot in a few things. First, it would help us build relationships with the customer (Oh, i see you mentioned you had a project on xx, how'd that go?"). It will also help with better identifying customers who return to the service repeatedly in a short time frame and those who are being unsavory.