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Determining a Public Library Branch/Location

Several weeks ago I chatted with someone who was identified as a patron of the Ramapo Catskill Library System, who was looking for a specific book. When I clicked on the "info" tab in the bottom left of the chat screen, it showed this as the referral page: http://monroefreelibrary.org/2009/index.html. I copied and pasted that URL into another browser window, and it showed me that the patron had come from the website of the Monroe Free Library, so I showed them which copies of the book were specifically at that branch.

I think things like this can create a "wow" experience for the patron, because not only do we know which library system they are from, but we can identify their branch as well, without us having to ask them for the information. Of course, this does not always work, in cases where individual branches do not have their own website, or if the patron comes from a general website for the whole library system. But it can be a useful tip in some cases.

--Jaclyn McKewan, Western New York Library Resources Council

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Working in the IE Tabbed Environment

If you're using IE7 you may have had the following situation while working with QP:

Tabbed browsing is cool, but the fact that links from other programs (like your e-mail software) usually get sent to a new tab in the most recenlty-used window has caused problems for some librarians who are new to the tabbed environment in IE7.  Plus, if the Chat window isn't the "top" tab, its name won't display in the task bar, so if you have lots of windows open, you may have to dig around for Chat.

However, there's a simple fix!

This setting will keep your e-mail software, etc. from opening a new tab over your chat window.  It does , of course, open more windows on your desktop, so if that's more of an issue for you, then simply ignore this.

Hope this is helpful!

--Bill Pardue, Virtual Service Librarian, Arlington Heights Memorial Library

Making a Copy of a Question

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. 

Putting Statistical Reports into Excel 

 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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