September 2009 Meeting Minutes

Thanks to Gregor and the Carroll County Public Library for hosting us in their beautiful 7 month old green Finksburg branch.

AskUsNow! Update

Customer Service Refresher Training

The Customer Service Training is a two hour training; the first hour focusing on the interpersonal + reference skills, the second hour focusing on the software tools available for creating paths for customers instead of walls (resources, follow‐up, etc). Both Julie and Cathay do this training. It is worth 2 CEU contact hours.

The trial run of the Customer Service training was @Pratt on 8/25 (Monday). We have another scheduled there for October 7th which will be archived for online access. Starting immediately you can schedule this face to face or online (via Wimba) training for staff. Contact Julie to schedule.

We’d like to have this be a f2f and virtual training but we’re unsure how to structure one activity for the virtual environment and Debbie Barlow brought up that Wimba has issues with Ubuntu. Betty added that it could be a bandwidth issue, and suggested to plan trainings in the mornings.

With a show of hands, most liaisons present were interested in scheduling the Customer Service training for their staff.

Crisis Refresher Training

This training is a result of the Crisis Guidelines made available last year. A completely online (via Wimba) training, Jennifer Blunt and Jeri Cain of Caroline County will discuss how to recognize and deal with a crisis situation and how to manage your reactions to stressful situations. Jeri will post availability of the training soon. This training runs 90 minutes to 2 hours long and is eligible for CEUs.

Staff Support Website

Our currently staff support site (www.askusnow.info/partners) continues to be under development. You can see the progress at http://linus.bcpl.net/askustest. It will eventually live at www.askusnow.info/staff. We are using Drupal to develop it. The team consists of Julie, Cathay, Betty, Amy Ford (St. Mary’s), Jess Chaiken (NARIC), Tina Pickens (BCPL), Sarah Smith (BCPL), Jessica Nhem (Caroline County) and Cindy Bowen (NAL); they all have been working tremendously hard with this project.

We’re waiting for the “test” site to move over where it will finally live (askusnow.info/staff) as well as for the front page design to be done and all of the content to be uploaded.

Other than the new CMS and design, the site will continue to offer the same information is always has to help liaisons and providers to their best. One major addition to the site is the “Community” area that will be a locked down area (password required to read and add content) that will be a safe space for the AskUsNow! community to share with each other.

Bob Baldwin asked if the website would replace the listserv. Julie said that while it may in the future, she’s going to let it happen organically instead of forcing people to adapt to a new site and a new way of doing things all at once.

Budget 2010

As of meeting day (9/1/2009) we enter into our 7th grant and remain funded through August 31, 2010. Our marketing line took the biggest hit for the coming year and we will have to get very creative this year, relying on our partner libraries to get the word out. Plans are in the works. Additionally, we received a reduction in our contract to QuestionPoint by promising to add an additional 5‐6 hours of global coverage in the January 2010 – December 2010 timeframe. Debbie and Kendra offered to potentially change their evening local hours to global. We will discuss this more at or before our December meeting.

For 2010 we have enough money to make our television commercial but it was recently found that television commercials are not an allowable expense for federal funds. We are looking into ways around this.

With the extra money left over from the FY09 grant, 27,500 additional highlighters were ordered.

Donations now accepted

As prompted by a couple of customers, AskUsNow! is now able to receive donations! All donations be made out to “BCPL – AskUsNow!” and sent to:

Baltimore County Public Library – Administration
320 York Road
Towson, MD 21204

Julie is hopeful that donations will come in and that she can add a “donate” button or “text2donate” feature to the askusnow.info website soon in the future.

Discussion: Limited Resource Allocation

With the limited number of marketing materials available for FY09 and FY10, Julie attempted a resource allocation formula that took into consideration previous amounts given as well as numbers given by the liaisons and county marketing people on how many highlighters and/or memo pads they would want in a year assuming they could have as many as they wanted. It soon became apparent a different calculation was needed.

The group discussed that for public libraries, a # based on % of county population was probably a good bet. Academic and special libraries will continue to estimate #’s based on # of BI classes, orientations, events, etc and get #’s to Julie soonest.

For future reference (when there is $ to be spent again) we will consider more age‐specific items like stickers or tattoos for children and other items for adults.

 

We broke for lunch at 12.
Darrell @Carroll County gave us a wonderful tour of the new green Finksburg Library.

 

Discussion: How are you staffing?

Beverly Lehrer introduced this topic on the listserv but since we were all in person we wanted to get a feel for where we all were on this. We wanted to know if the staffing of AskUsNow! at your institutions was an implied informal, formal, or other policy.

Stevenson ‐ seemed like in the beginning most people were not interested, so staff was chosen by those who wanted to

Pratt – all IS staff is trained and required to participate

BCPL – IS was the only department involved at first, but when AUN went Statewide, administration decided that two branches needed to participate (the least busiest ones). Problem with the model is that often when someone was trained, the staff person often moved to another branch location. The limitation is that the staff member cannot do this while at the desk, so time must be given to staff off the desk.

Carroll County PL: Limited to five staff in the whole system. CCPL just started texting last week, too, but those staff are not AUN providers.

Allegany College: They provide two days a week email reference and chose the least busy campus (Pennsylvania campus), and required it as part of the job.

Q: Who has it in job description? About a third raised their hands. It is required as part of their jobs.

AACPL: The library that has the most staff (and happens to be the busiest) covers this. It is up to the manager of the branches to determine which positions can participate. Two out of three do. They also have QP email (staff who don’t do chat). Works out well, Betty mentioned.

Q: Does anyone cover their shifts from home? Carroll County, Cathay, but it seems like no one else.

Howard County: It’s good that it is part of LATI, and they have at least one person at every location, and more at their busier locations. Although they’ve had people promoted or changes to staffing, it has worked out.

Q: Any children’s librarians? John has a couple and has noticed that these librarians are very good with the younger patrons online. There are a few systems who use children’s librarians.

Beverly will email the listserv to get more information.

Presentation + Discussion: Text Reference

In the recent months, people have been approaching Julie asking what AskUsNow! is doing with texting. Right now, nothing. Julie was conflicted over whether AskUsNow! should help facilitate the addition of texting within the individual partner libraries or if AskUsNow! should offer a collaborative text option. Check out the presentation (pdf) for more details. No decision was made but Julie will continue to figure things out with your help. Any ideas, comments, or questions are welcome.

Schedule Analysis

A long time coming, Julie passed around the schedule analysis, reporting happily that we’re on target with how many librarians we have staffing versus how many customers are coming in on average at any given moment. See Appendix A and B for additional information.

Comcast Issue

The question about Comcast, and the bounced emails came up. As of 8/22/09, Comcast has been blocking emails coming from QuestionPoint. This means that no customers with a comcast.net email account has been getting transcripts or email follow‐up if it was done through QP. QP is aware of the problem but we do not know more. There was some discussion about how to work with QP and/or Comcast. One work around is that all customer communication can happen outside of QP as Comcast.net customers are still getting email, just not from QuestionPoint. Cathay will send the liaisons the bounced emails from their customers so they can be followed up with.

 

Thank you to Cathay for taking the notes.

In Attendance

Amy Ford – St. Mary’s Co.
Amy Swackhamer‐ Frederick Co.
Betty Morganstern, Anne Arundel Co.
Beverly Lehrer‐ Montgomery College
Bob Baldwin – Allegany College
Catherine McGuire – MD State Law Library
Cathay Crosby – AskUsNow!
Debbie Barlow‐ Howard Co.
Gregor Becker ‐ Carroll Co.
Janice Beall – Allegany Co.
Janice Lathrop – Anne Arundel CC
Jeri Cain‐ Caroline Co.
Jim Lynch – Baltimore City CC
John Krivak‐ Prince Georges Co.
Julie Strange ‐ AskUsNow!
Karen Quinn‐Wisniewski ‐ CCBC
Kendra Frost ‐ Harford Co.
Liz Beere ‐ Carroll Community College
Mallika Pichumani – Montgomery County PL
Margie Rhoden ‐ Calvert Co.
Sue Bonsteel- Stevenson University
Sue Tinanoff‐ Baltimore County Public Library
Susan Pluhar – Pratt/SLRC

Notified Absence

Alison Sherwell – Charles Co.
Ann Wheeler – DNR
Cindy Todd ‐ UMCP
Elizabeth Hulett – Washington Co.
Jessica Ambrose – Harford CC
Karen Neville, Worcester Co.
Mimi Bolotin – Montgomery Co.
Norma Schmidt, Prince George’s CC
Suzy Bell‐ Cecil Co.
Theresa Mastrodonato – UMES

Jess Chaiken – NARIC
Karl Schneider ‐ NAL
Mandy Hackley, Salisbury University
Mary Rice – Charles County Law Library
Mindy Mallette – Wicomico Co.
Rebecca Rienzi – Pathfinders for Autism
Terry Darr – Loyola Blakefield School
Tyson Fogel, MD LBPH