Have you ever gotten a laundry list of questions on one question form and wanted a separate Q&A record for each?  Have you ever gotten a question that you wanted more than one librarian or more than one area to work on simultaneously?

With the Change Patron Email feature, you can easily make copies of questions.  Although the feature was originally implemented to facilitate follow up to "anonymous" chat sessions or to correct misspelled e-mail addresses, a copy of the question is created in the process.  If you use the default option to Leave Unchanged the original question (the other options are to Delete and to Close), the new question (with a new question ID) is put in the Active list along with the original.  All the question history to date is also copied, and if the original had been assigned, the copy is put into the queue of the same librarian.  From the Active list it can be opened to be assigned (or re-assigned), referred, or answered.

This copy feature also meets another frequent need: that of sending a copy of an answer to another person or address.  But don't use this option carelessly--once the new question (or copy) is in the system, only the institution administrator can delete.

--Michelle Cadoree Bradley, Business and Science Librarian, Library of Congress

E-mailed Patron Replies

Many of you have noted that replies coming into QuestionPoint from outside (from patrons or from e-mail partners) are difficult to understand, and they repeat the transaction history over and over again.  QuestionPoint is not itself an e-mail server; rather, it passes text to an e-mail server and accepts text from that server.  It cannot recognize one kind of text from any other; that is, it cannot recognize a reply from the original text that initiated the reply.

Think of a reply from a patron as simply an e-mail message: if the patrons' e-mail client has the retain-previous-messages utility turned on, a reply will include all foregoing text in the e-mail message to which s/he is replying.  Most clients do work this way unless the user purposely turns it off.  If the foregoing text is not deleted before you save the patron's reply message, you will have two sets of the transaction history saved!  And when you respond again to the patron, everything in the history is sent, as usual, but now that history includes duplication.

To read a patron's or partner's reply, you need only look at the very top.  When you see the header --Original Message-- (or something similar) you are getting into "history" that is already recorded in QuestionPoint.  The easiest thing to do is to click on the Edit button, delete --Original Message-- and everything below it, and then click the Save button.  Now your history includes for this "incident" only the reply and not a duplication of everything the patron received as well.

 Those who work a lot with reports will notice that there are no longer Export buttons at the end of report sections or pages.  This button used to enable you to save the data to a delimited file, which you could then import into Excel using that program's import functionality.  A more efficient way to get your data from the QuestionPoint reports display into Excel is simply to highlight the data you want, copy it, then paste it directly into an Excel spreadsheet.  A little tweaking of the column formats, and you're ready to manipulate the data in any way you want.  Although you do not have a separate CSV file, the steps from QP display to Excel spreadsheet are far fewer, and the final result is not different.

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