AskAway has guidelines in place to help you respond to patrons who are abusing the service with prank calls, inappropriate language, or rude behaviour. They're designed to provide you with the tools you need to communicate clearly with the patron, give them an opportunity to change their behaviour, and if needed, to end the session.
In addition to these guidelines, here are some general tips to respond to inappropriate and prank chats based on feedback and input from service providers.
Best practices and tips to help you prepare for unexpected patrons.
New citation videos from Memorial University.
Knowing when to end an AskAway session can be tough sometimes. When AskAway is swamped, or the patron has been uncommunicative for awhile, or perhaps appears to be disconnecting from the session... How can we successfully close the session for the patron?
What kinds of questions do we answer?
We are open to all questions, and will provide help with course-related research tasks e.g. finding books, journals, articles, etc..
--Service Guidelines for Service Providers
Recently on AskAway patrons have often appeared to disconnect or disappear without warning. Sometimes this is due to internet outages, navigating away via Qwidget links, QuestionPoint server troubles or the patron finding the resources they need and forgetting to return. The patron status indicator often turns to a red dot in these cases.
If someone has a DOI, and no other information about an article, how do you search for that article?
You can go here, to The DOI System:
http://www.doi.org/
Scroll down the page, and look for the section: Resolve a DOI name
Copy and paste (or type) your DOI into the search field, and click the submit button.
Presto! The article's information is displayed. Now you can search by journal title, article title, author, or whatever you like.
Some AskAwayers have been wondering: what do we do when patrons get an error when trying to login to library resources? Here are some questions to pinpoint the problem:
1. Have they ever logged in before? How recently was it?
Some institutions require that the students activate their accounts (in-person or online). Sometimes they have to re-activate their accounts with each new term.
2. Do they get any error messages? What are they?
Since the Public Library version of AskAway has been closed, we have been receiving increased numbers of questions from high school and elementary school students.
Having heard so much about "freedom of information", I thought we'd be able to use Google to do the searches, but I've discovered that the students' reading level can be really prohibitive when relying on a standard search engine.
Hello all, on Saturday, May 26th, a patron from UNBC was looking for the heating values of softwoods and hardwoods, specifically:
