Changes to our digital reference services

Several weeks ago, Lisa Ellis and I were able to switch the email reference service over from the Baruch staff mail account to QuestionPoint, which is the same system that we also use for our chat reference service. In practical terms, this means that those of you who are doing email reference will no longer log in to the staff mail account to see if there are new questions; instead, you'll now log in to the QuestionPoint web site. To get people familiarized with the QuestionPoint interface, I've been training people one-at-a-time on the days that they've been scheduled to monitor email reference. If you have any questions about this new service, you can ask Lisa Ellis (who remains the administrator for our email reference service) or me.

As we switched to QuestionPoint for email, Lisa and I decided to get the email reference form revised, which if you take a look at it is more streamlined than the old form. Thanks to Saad Abulhab and his staff for building the form for us.

There's also a notable change to our chat reference service. Beginning yesterday, our shared subscription to QuestionPoint for chat reference was activated. If you are monitoring chat reference, you will now begin to see questions coming in from patrons at Hunter College, Brooklyn College, and the CUNY Graduate Center. The librarians at these schools will soon begin monitoring chat reference during hours of the week that Baruch librarians aren't, thereby increasing the odds that Baruch patrons who log on to chat will get connected to a CUNY librarian. Another compelling reason for sharing the subscription is that the annual cost to Baruch for using QuestionPoint has gone down dramatically.

Here at Baruch, I remain the administrator for our chat service. I am also now the group administrator for the CUNY subscription group (Baruch, Brooklyn, Hunter, and Grad Center). The local administrators at the other schools are:

• Brooklyn College: Beth Evans and Stephanie Walker
• CUNY Graduate Center: Polly Thistlethwaite and Michael Adams
  
• Hunter College: Lauren Yannotta

To aid communication between our four institutions, we've created a wiki for librarians who are staffing the service: QP at CUNY.

Let me know if you have any questions about chat reference. FYI: I've updated the wiki pages on chat reference and email reference to reflect these new changes.