Trustworthy Internet sources

In recent years the Internet has become a tempting easy source of “good-enough” reference information. QuestionPoint enables your library to offer your highest standard professional reference service via the Web—complementing the popular search services with resources and expertise that go beyond the Web.

QuestionPoint is a reference service that library users can trust. Comprehensive, authoritative reference goes beyond the Internet and the World Wide Web—vast as the Web may be, even larger pools of resources remain outside the scope of the Web. QuestionPoint is operated by professionals who understand these resources and know how to access and apply them to reference questions.

Communicating with your customers

The QuestionPoint service provides for common online means of communications with library users. All the Web-based pages and forms—including the question submission and chat forms—require only a standard browser. All further direct communication between the library user and service providers in QuestionPoint service is handled through e-mail and chat.

QuestionPoint also provides a tool for assembling and analyzing surveys of your user base. Periodic surveys can help keep you in touch with the common desires and trends of your customer community. This intelligence can assist you in designing services, resources and messaging to help your users further benefit from your library.

The library user has a reference question: What happens next?

Once a question is submitted or a chat session is completed, the question or transcript goes into the local reference librarian's queue of reference questions. The librarian browses this list to retrieve a question to work on or a chat session transcript that may require follow up.

The librarian has a wide variety of options for handling this question. She can answer the question directly or route it—manually or through an automated process—to another librarian, or even another library, to provide an answer or assistance.

Follow-up options

If there is any question about the user's intent, or the scope of the question—or any other aspect of the question—the librarian can email the user for a clarification, and perhaps a dialog will ensue to make clear exactly what is being asked.

From the library user's perspective, however, the culmination of the process is the "answer:" an alert appears in her email, and she retrieves the answer in an email posted by the librarian or the network member.

Finally—after the user has received the answer—the question, answer, and any other information that has been gathered can be stored in a Knowledge Base—a collection of question-and-answer sets.

Cooperation improves the service

Broaden your answering power by searching the global and local knowledge base of previously asked questions and answers. Thus benefiting the next library user who asks the same or similar question with a quick, relevant, and high quality answer. As the Knowledge Base grows, its use as an effective reference discovery tool will benefit both the answering librarian and the patron in terms of quality and speed.

QuestionPoint enables your library to interact with customers at their points of need—maximizing the customer’s convenience and positive perception of your services.