Enquire Participation in 24/7 Reference Cooperative
Enquire, a reference service comprising of 86 public libraries in the UK have formalised their working arrangements with the 24/7 Reference Cooperative, an around the clock reference service, spanning the globe. The Cooperative helps supplement hours of service by being available 24 hours a day, seven days a week including holidays.
By October, the entire Enquire group of libraries will monitor the 24/7 cooperative services queue, meaning that during their shifts they will be on hand to take questions from anywhere around the globe. Currently, anyone can use the Enquire service by accessing via the People’s Network.
And of course, by participating fully in the 24/7 Reference Cooperative, it also means that the 1400 libraries that currently support this service globally will be on hand to support the questions of UK citizens in the hours where UK library staff are not on hand to assist.
A pilot group set up initially to monitor the numbers of requests coming from the US have been very enthusiastic about the decision to take this forward and become a fully participating member of the Cooperative. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with the librarians who were involved in a pilot project saying that they had learned a lot of interesting facts by taking questions from outside the UK.
Learn more about QuestionPoint, the software behind Enquire