a word about QuestionPoint service interruptions

This week I have had both a QuestionPoint Users Group and a 24/7 Reference Cooperative Advisory Board meeting and I received further clarification as to the issues that QuestionPoint has been experiencing the last few months:

On June 21st, QuestionPoint moved to a larger capacity back-end database and new operating system. This was a move initiated by OCLC for all their products because of increasing traffic and the need for higher capacity.

In September, traffic increased as per usual with the start of the school year and this stressed the new database application. There were tweaks and optimizations completed to manage the issues occurring but it wasn't enough. Throughout the last week of September, there were many "bounces" to the server. When QP "bounces" the system what they're doing is taking the server offline and immediately rebooting it in order to clear out the cache and database tables that get bogged down. On average, a "bounce" takes 10 - 15 minutes to complete before the system is up and running again. Often, Cathay and I do not get a lot of notice before a "bounce" occurs but if you are unable to access QP, try again in a few minutes.

September 27th, QuestionPoint moved to a previous version of the new back-end, high-capacity database software and saw a significant reduction in connection and server issues. For whatever reason this move also caused the data counts for the 9/27 daily reports to quadruple. The monthly data counts for September are reported to be correct but the 9/27 daily count is still incorrect.

Currently, response times are mostly back to pre-June levels, sometimes better. There are occasional surges (like today's problems) but the QuestionPoint team is tirelessly working to identify and resolve these issues. Both Cathay and I and the QuestionPoint team thank you all for your patience while these issues are sorted out.

Cathay and I do our best to keep the Staff Support website and mdaskusnow listserv up to date when we know issues are occurring but the best and fastest thing we can do is update our status messages in our Meebos on the Contact page. You can also use these to contact us in case of an issue. If you were in the habit of checking the OCLC system alerts page I learned that the page is updated by OCLC support and sometimes takes a while for QP to get an alert out; they usually forgo this if they believe it's a "short" issue. Instead, they rely on messages to the QP_L list, which we then fwd to the mdaskusnow listserv and note on my meebo.

When customers try to access AskUsNow! and QuestionPoint is down, they see an OCLC page letting them know that the system is down. If they are already in a chat session and the server goes down, they are disconnected; unfortunately in this manner they may not realize it is a tech problem versus anything else. We do have a note on our Welcome Login page that customers see when the come into the service that lets them know we are having difficulties. Hopefully this message helps alert people to the possibility of connecton issues.

Again, we thank you for your patience and hope that we are able to keep the frustration down to a minimum. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions about this.

New Look & Feel to the Flash Chat Librarian Interface

Coming with the November 23rd install (Sunday @3am), the Flash Chat librarian interface is getting a face lift. While the functionality remains the same (except it's faster!), it looks much better and has a lot of new features that I think people will love.

Check out the 1hr-long QuestionPoint webinar for a tour through the new interface. 

Check out the screenshots with some annotations by me.

Tips for Handling UK customers

Recently, public libraries from the UK joined the 24/7 Reference Cooperative which meant we were now part of an international cooperative. Yay! This also meant that we had some interesting things to deal with, including different legal and education systems, language barriers (who knew!) and other such things.

Last month, QuestionPoint had a training webinar called Answering Questions for UK Patrons. If you were unable to attend the webinar, it is now available online for viewing.

Check out the QP Blog for links to the 66 minute recording as well as resources.

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.

QuestionPoint Quality Tip Tuesday

Don't forget to check the QuestionPoint blog on Tuesdays (or Wednesdays) for the Quality Tip of the week! (link is to all posts marked with the Quality tag)

QP Users Council Discussion: Commerical Ask Communities

Vince Mariner (the Joe and I of PA) recently asked the QP Users Council (formerly the Transition Task Force, a council on which Joe and I sit) about Amazon's AskVille:

"Is it old news or is this really something new from Amazon? Anyway, I wonder if there is a way to integrate their presentation of “topics needing answers” into the QuestionPoint Shared Follow-up."

Amazon's AskVille was actually launched in December of last year- I don't think they did a complete marketing blitz when they launched but I've noticed this popping back up more recently. AskVille, like Yahoo! Answers has a "currency" (or points, with Yahoo! Answers) system depending on how active you are with the community. Apparently the "currency" will be usable on Questville.com where "users will be able to participate in contests, exchange coins with fellow users, earn additional coins, and redeem them for other prizes/rewards." Questville.com is scheduled to launch in 2007 but from what I thought, it was supposed to have launched already.

I think it would be a great idea to be able to incorporate their "stumpers" into QP for the Librarian community to answer but I think the main thing behind Yahoo! Answers (http://answers.yahoo.com), AskVille, MSN's QnA Live (http://qna.live.com) and Wondir (http://www.wondir.com) is that they build a community around the question and answers / topics. That's one thing we don't do- for better and worse. While our customers may feel alone- they can also feel better because if they have a sensitive topic, they can be completely anonymous, their questions aren't out there for the world to see, and they will be getting better answers.

Building a community around questions and answers / topics also reminds me of the those folks who are using their library blog for QandA- either officially, or unofficially by having the librarians actively reading customer comments and starting a discussion by commenting back. Just another way we are getting out there and actively going to the info need instead of waiting for the questions to come to us.

WherAmazon's AskVille was actually launched in December of last year- I don't think they did a complete marketing blitz when they launched but I've noticed this popping back up more recently. AskVille, like Yahoo! Answers has a "currency" (or points, with Yahoo! Answers) system depending on how active you are with the community. Apparently the "currency" will be usable on Questville.com where "users will be able to participate in contests, exchange coins with fellow users, earn additional coins, and redeem them for other prizes/rewards." Questville.com is scheduled to launch in 2007 but from what I thought, it was supposed to have launched already.

I think it would be a great idea to be able to incorporate their "stumpers" into QP for the Librarian community to answer but I think the main thing behind Yahoo! Answers (http://answers.yahoo.com), AskVille, MSN's QnA Live (http://qna.live.com) and Wondir (http://www.wondir.com) is that they build a community around the question and answers / topics. That's one thing we don't do- for better and worse. While our customers may feel alone- they can also feel better because if they have a sensitive topic, they can be completely anonymous, their questions aren't out there for the world to see, and they will be getting better answers.

Building a community around questions and answers / topics also reminds me of the those folks who are using their library blog for QandA- either officially, or unofficially by having the librarians actively reading customer comments and starting a discussion by commenting back. Just another way we are getting out there and actively going to the info need instead of waiting for the questions to come to us.

If the goal is to help people when they have questions (and answers, really, make ppl feel like they aren't alone because if there is an answer, someone else has tread this ground before), what's the best way of doing that? Do we build communities around knowing certain topics or just around knowing? Do we build communities at all? Do we let people stay secluded from others asking questions? Do we let ppl "evesdrop" and see what others are asking (real time question feed on Askusnow.info?)?

What do the customers want?

**Update: This discussion has morphed into a discussion of "Reference 2.0" on the QuestionPoint blog.**

What Joe was doing while at the ALA Annual Conference 2007 in Washington, DC [Part 2]

This is a continuation of yesterday's post by the same title, Part 1.


Sunday, 6/24/2007

8:00 a.m.: Meeting of the RSS/MARS Virtual Reference Service Committee. At this conference we met at the Hotel Washington during the larger MARS All-Committee meeting. By the way, MARS stands for the Machine-Assisted Reference Section. MARS and RSS are two of the six sections that make up the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA), which is a division of ALA.

We had several items on our agenda, but these I think are the most interesting to share:

• We finalized plans for the program that the committee took the lead on sponsoring the next day, "See It, Hear It, Touch It: How do Communication and Learning Styles Affect Virtual Reference Service?" More on this later.
• I shared the proposed description for the program the committee will be sponsoring at next year's ALA Annual Conference 2008 in Anaheim, CA. The topic of "trust in VR" was decided upon at our meeting this past January at Midwinter 2007, so having a written description was the next step. Some committee members had shared ideas between then and now that were incorporated into the description. Now that the program has been approved, we can still tweak the description over the next several months, but here's what we have currently. Title: Please Talk to Strangers Online: Spreading Trust in Cooperative Virtual Reference. Description: Will another library or vendor staff make my customer happy? Will they come back after their experience? Does it make a difference if an academic or public librarian picks up the question? What about our patrons? They trust Wikipedia. They trust Google. What do we do to make them trust us in the same way? A lively panel of VR leaders will explore the issues, present their experiences, and recommend strategies relevant to all types of libraries. We don't yet have any speakers lined up, but will try to firm up at least 3 people before the end of July. Please let me know if you have someone in mind.
• Buff Hirko, chair of our "Tutorial" subcommittee gave an update regarding the Virtual Reference Adventure. This is an online interactive tutorial developed by the Washington State Library last year. This Tutorial was then turned over to ALA RUSA so that it would be available to anyone in library-world who wanted to use it for free. The VR Committee is now responsible for maintaining it. She is looking for more people who would like to work on the ongoing maintenance, especially from people who can bring a public library perspective. (If anyone working with AskUsNow! would be interested in participating, please let me know and I'll share your contact info with Buff. I know that she'd very much appreciate it and I think it would be a great experience for those interested. She's a great person to work with.) The tutorial can be found at: http://cs.ala.org/ra/vr_adventure/

10:30 a.m.: MARS Chair's Program - Harnessing the Hive: Social Networks and Libraries. I really wanted to attend this program in full, but unfortunately got there about half way through. It was a packed ballroom too - with many of us hanging at the doors in the back and sitting along the walls. When I came in, speaking was Tim Spalding, the creator/coordinator of LibraryThing. In general what LibraryThing does is to allow people to search for books based on the tags (personally created subject headings made by other searchers, in a way). Some libraries have even started to use LibraryThing as a search tool integrated as part of their catalogs because they see that the tagging works better than DDC or LC indexing in some ways. Sorry that I missed the presentations by Matt Bejune and Meredith Farkas, who both spoke about aspects of using wikis in library service. I hear that they were very interesting.

1:30 p.m.: RSS New Reference Research: the 13th Annual Reference Research Forum. The research forum has proven to be a great learning opportunity and I now make it a point to attend it at each Annual conference. There were three sets of speakers this year.

Marie Radford and Lynn S. Connaway presented "Not Dead Yet! Ready Reference in Live Chat Reference." They've looked at a set of 850 chat transcripts made available through QuestionPoint (stripped of identifying information) and coded each by the type of question. As it turns out, Ready Reference is the second most frequently seen category of question - so those who say that ready reference is going away really aren't correct in that assumption, or else they just aren't considering that these questions are being asked in the online VR format instead of face-to-face. From many-to-few, here's the quantity of questions as classified: Subject Search, Ready Reference, Policy & Procedural Questions, Holdings Questions, Research, Inappropriate, Directional, and finally very few Readers Advisory. By the way, the question coding system used by Marie and Lynn was developed by Julie Arnold and Neal Kaske, former AskUsNow! providers, while they were at the University of Maryland College Park Libraries.

The second presentation was by Sarah Maximiek and Erin Rushton of Binghamton University Libraries (NY) on "Evaluating the Quality of Instant Messaging" service at their university library. They did something very similar to the previous study mentioned, but used the question categorizing scheme to code the questions that had come in through their IM service. One interesting thing I took from their presentation is that the librarians will often leave a session open (without closing it) and often the student will come back. I'm thinking more and more that our AskUsNow! customers likely fit the same model, where they assume that like in an IM format they can drop in and out without the transaction being terminated. While most of us are ready to end the chat if we haven't heard anything from the customer in a few minutes. We may be having different expectations of the interaction than our customers.

The third presentation was by Beth Evans of the Brooklyn College Library on "Library Websites / Library MySpace Profiles" and by far this was the longest. I don't think many people minded the length of here talk though, as she was giving some great creative examples of what libraries have done to interact with their customers through use of library MySpace pages. It gave me lots of ideas regarding our Maryland AskUsNow! MySpace page that I'd love to do. I think a main point from Beth is that you need to make sure to decorate and embellish your page as much as you can. Some libraries are using a plugin to provide a catalog search box from their MySpace pages and some are also using a plugin to provide a Meebo widget to allow IM chat with a librarian from the page. If someone leaves a comment on your MySpace page, you need to reply to it, otherwise it seems like you're not paying attention. You really also need to post to the blog on the MySpace page frequently. Two great examples are the Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library (KS) and the Bracken Library at Ball State University MySpace pages. There's a really clever video on that Bracken Library page geared to helping students understand the difference between scholarly and popular articles too.

5:00 p.m.: Informal get-together of members of the QuestionPoint Users Council (QPUC) and the 24/7 Reference Advisory Board, of which both Julie and I are members of both. This was held at the restaurant Zaytina. While there, I think I was able to convey some of our concerns about the limitations and difficulties of getting reports and statewide survey results. During this conference I've also recognized that interest among libraries nationwide to integrate commercial IM with the structure of 24 hour staffing has reached a high point. I made mention of this during the get-together as well with some on the QP team and I think that they were receptive. It's really going to need to become a priority for them in the coming year, I think.

[To be continued in Part 3]

-Joe