Have you ever run into a situation where you needed to get a file (say, something from a database) to a customer, but they didn't have an email and couldn't get in to the database?
PROBLEM SOLVED! Use senduit.com
Just upload your file, designate when you want the file to expire (anywhere between 30 mins a 1 week) and send the customer the private link!
There's no need for your customer to have an email address, or for you to reveal yours. :-)
Have you heard of ChaCha yet? It's a place people can get answers (from real people) just by calling or texting.
It's a venue I personally think libraries should have been in LONG AGO, but alas, here we are.
I have a mixed review of ChaCha- I've used it a few times to see what it was like and only about 1/2 the time did i get an answer i liked. Perhaps I hold these things to a higher standard than most non-librarians would, but i wasn't totally impressed.
I WAS impressed, however, at HOW i could get an answer and HOW FAST it was. I'm in the grocery store wondering if peaches, apples, and carrots all have pectin in them and within minutes, I know that Apples have a lot of pectin, peaches have a little, and carrots have none. What would the response have been if i called my local library with that question? I couldn't have asked AskUsNow! because I was in the grocery store!
Betty@AACPL fwded a Marketplace Radio spot about ChaCha to the listserv: "Texting experts for an Internet search"
What are your thoughts on ChaCha and this method of Q&A?
I think it speaks greatly towards library's epic role- as information providers, question answerer's, search guides, and best friends... not just the collectors and purveyors of books (which is only ONE medium information comes in).
*this was also a message to the MDAUN listserv*
I have a fun new thing to tell you about that will help point customers to specific places on a website.
It's called CiteBite. It's a website that allows you cut and paste a quote from a website in, the source URL and it produces a URL that you can send a customer that will send them the page with the quote highlighted in yellow! This is a very handy thing to have around when you've got a text-heavy site that you're trying to maneuver through with a customer.
Show me how it works!
Say you had a customer who wanted to know about Art in 19th century France. You've pointed them to the page on the NGA website that can help them, but they're not seeing where you're trying to point them ("With the revolution, French painting resumed its moral and political purpose and embraced the style known as neoclassicism", second paragraph.)
You can go to CiteBite, enter "With the revolution, French painting resumed its moral and political purpose and embraced the style known as neoclassicism." into the Quote box, enter "http://www.nga.gov/collection/gallery/gg56/gg56-over1.html" into the source box and click Make Citebite.
You'll get this link: http://pages.citebite.com/x2q1r3s4s3pfr which highlights the area you were trying to point the customer to.
That's awesome! Are there any drawbacks?
A few. While I've done some testing to see if citebite pages show up in the page push area of QuestionPoint and it seems to work, there's no guarantee that it always will.
Also, if a page has frames or tables, it will show only the content in the frame/table that you're quoting from. This may be confusing to some customers as it might not look like the right page. To help, I'd still send the original website (http://www.nga.gov/collection/gallery/gg56/gg56-over1.html, for example) but use CiteBite if they're having trouble locating something within a page.
Thanks to Jim DeArmey @ BCPL for the tip & help with testing!
