Meeting Minutes: November 17, 2005
InfoEyes Advisory Committee Meeting
Attendees:
Linda Rossman, Ann Hay, Catherine Durivage, Diana Sussman, Joe Thompson, Lori Bell, Meghan Clark McDaniel, Mollyne Honor, Robin Rousu, Sharon Ruda
Location:
This meeting was held in an online iVocalize room.
Meeting Time:
1:00 pm Central/ 2:00 pm Eastern
1. Review of InfoEyes website items that have been updated since the last meeting-contacts, participating libraries, language for holiday closing, and interim help pages
Updates have been made to the InfoEyes website. Catherine and Linda have been working on it. Participants and Contact info have been updated. An interim Help page is also up, which will have to be updated again once the online talk-request form is available. Catherine highlighted the great help that Ann Hay has contributed in making web updates to the page.
Participating libraries info has one correction needed. Robin Rousu's e-mail address is wrong, it should be robin@wtbbl.org.
If anyone has other changes to the Partners, contact, or Help pages to offer, please let Linda know.
The closing information has been streamlined to make it easier to understand.
2. Statistical Report (Catherine) and any questions on last month's minutes which have been posted to website
Catherine has sent Ann and Linda the October stats. They aren't on the web site yet. Highest total for questions in a month was just in October. There were 34 questions, with one as a chat session. February was beat, with 33 questions. We should be proud that we have both repeat customers and new people using the service. It looks like we've had 4 chat sessions this year (2005), one new one in October.
3. Address the question of whether regular email reference questions as well as emails requesting live service should both show up on the list serve
The live chat form: David Leslie (OCLC) has been working with Catherine and Ann Hay. He's sent a draft form to Catherine. A few people are looking at it now to check the accessibility of the form. There were a few problems that are being worked out.
Diana likes having the questions come to the listserv, as it helps keep us all aware of what kind of questions are being asked. Catherine also agreed that it's nice to see what people are asking, even if it's not our day to answer questions there. Diana did ask that once requests for live service start coming in, we need to make sure that these are highlighted in such a way that they stand out from all of the rest of e-mail questions. This might be with a special attention-getting subject line. Catherine is working with David Leslie to make sure this is done. Linda agrees that seeing all questions on the list is good.
We will go ahead and let questions still come to the listserv even after the new of the two forms goes live. We will re-evaluate once the two forms are available.
Mollyne asked for clarification on how requests for live voice service should be handled. Diana helped to answer this. A request for live service should be handled by any library that gets the request by the listserv. It is not the responsibility of only the library scheduled to check the QuestionPoint account for that day. We ideally want to give this person service as quickly as possible, so anyone on the InfoEyes listserv who knows how to use iVocalize should work in it. Catherine said that the new form will allow the customer to reserve a specific day and time, as well as make a request for live service. Anyone should pick up a request for live service.
4. Discuss possibility of in-service training for InfoEyes staff and suggestions for trainers
Would we like to consider training on reference refresher? Linda remarked that we're predominately using free online web sources, since we all have different database sets. Several participants expressed that they haven't worked in real reference environments for a long time.
Joe offered to help with this kind of training. We may set up a meeting in between meetings to figure out what kind of content would be needed and outline it out. Ideally we could offer this kind of training during one of our regular monthly online meetings. Sharon Ruda also mentioned http://learning.libraryu.org/home/ as a place that offers this kind of training. Diana mentioned that we might want to look at the OPAL archives, since they have likely held related classes: http://www.opal-online.org. A library in Norway is even now participating.
Lori Bell described some of the programs that OPAL has offered and will be offering. These include book discussions (i.e. hard-core mysteries), storytimes, and more. The same kind of programming offered in libraries is offered in online OPAL auditoriums. The OPAL programs are even recorded as podcasts that can be listened to later.
If Joe provided training in this format, it could be saved as an archive and listened to later. Catherine suggested that we'll open up the discussion of content to whoever might be interested.
5. Thank you to everyone for remembering to close questions after answering patron reference questions
Everyone is encouraged to "Close" their question once they have answered a question in QuestionPoint.
Diana asked about surveys. When people answer the survey, are the surveys saved in QuestionPoint besides being posted on the listserv? Catherine is keeping these in her e-mail, but she will check to make sure these are being kept in QuestionPoint as well. Joe mentioned that QuestionPoint is making some updates on December 11, so even if this isn't available now, it's possible that they will be in December. We will look forward to the discussion about a reference refresher.
Diana highlighted the work that Catherine, Linda, Ann, and Joe have done on updating the web page, the login forms, and scripts.
Catherine ended the meeting at 2:45 p.m. ET.
The next meeting is scheduled for Thursday, December 15 at 2:00 ET / 1:00 CT
Minutes submitted by: Joe Thompson