Implementation Services—Enjoy a single point of contact throughout the project. Your implementation manager partners with you to set milestones, define key tasks, design workflows and educate library staff.
Ongoing Support—First-line technical support during and after the implementation to help resolve any technical issues or questions that arise as you use the QuestionPoint service and participate in the 24/7 Reference Cooperative.
Meet users at their point of need—provide reference service around the clock with trustworthy, real-time one-on-one reference assistance from professional librarians, right from you library Web page or other Web portal. Wherever your customers are, you can be there too.
Expand your reference desk hours without increasing staff. For a modest weekly contribution of staffing to the Cooperative, you can provide failsafe coverage 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to your customers.
Belong to several groups simultaneously, such as a local consortium and a subject-specific group. Any number of librarians may monitor the service at any time. Within the Cooperative, this means that an individual customer’s library is more likely to be monitoring.
Q&A knowledge base that is carefully reviewed and maintained by Cooperative contributors.
Automatic subject referral through the Global Reference Network routes your submitted question or chat session to a partner library based on criteria such as subject, language or hours of coverage.
Reference Management Benefits & Features
Web-based chat, cobrowse and cooperative reference tools use best-in-class technology and require no special software or browser plug-ins. A librarian does not need to use Windows Operating System to do simple chat and page push (for highest-level co-browsing, Internet Explorer browser is required). A streamlined conference process allows librarians to transfer to another librarian smoothly. There is also support for multilingual reference transactions.
Unique Customizable Messages. Instead of just one list of scripted chat messages for an entire group of libraries, each library can add their own individual scripted messages, which appear when one of their customers comes into the queue.
Expanded Patron Link Views. This feature allows patrons, while still in session, to click on previous links sent to them by the librarian.
Administrative Monitoring. The librarian can add notes visible only to other librarians in the session or via QuestionPoint’s question follow-up after the session.The librarian can join any of their librarian’s chat sessions, to send private notes or suggestions, unseen by patrons.
Customizable Surveys and Reporting Tools. Each library can customize their own unique survey for patrons and make them available after the chat session, after a follow up is complete, or after an answer is sent in response to a student email. Surveys help libraries measure user satisfaction levels and make service improvements. Librarians have the flexibility to characterize sessions and retrieve statistical information through descriptive categories such as research, business, instruction, etc. to help them identify trends and perform usage analysis.
