libraryh3lp

FAQs on FAQs: Fabulous Footers

2013-05-15T09:34:00.000-04:00

Welcome back to FAQs on FAQs, a series designed to help you get the most out of your LibraryH3lp-powered FAQ. Last time, we showed how to reuse existing headers from your library's website within your FAQ. So it is only fair that we cover custom footers in this installment!

As with customizing headers, setting up a custom footer requires a little bit of template editing.

1) Add content. Place the desired content within the footer.html template. Or if you wish the footer to span the entire width of your page, comment out the footer block within the base.html template using HTML comments (as you did with your header in Step 1 of the previous installment) and place the desired content after the main "container" div.

2) Adjust styling. As with custom headers, your strategy for including the styling for your header elements will vary since there are several ways to handle CSS. Please refer to Step 2 of the previous installment for styling tips and tricks or e-mail support if you need any help sorting things out.

Advanced customization: Sticky Footers. If you want to be extra fancy, you can opt to make your footer sticky. A sticky footer always remains at the bottom of a page and can be attractive on your individual question pages where content may be short and your footer appears higher on the page. If you'd like a sticky footer for your FAQ, check out the "how to" in our online docs.

Want to get your own LibraryH3lp-powered FAQ site up and running? Need to import content from an existing knowledge base into your FAQ? E-mail us!

Missed a previous installment of FAQs on FAQs? Here are some quick links to help you catch up: real-time chat and e-mail contact options, mobile-specific view for patrons browsing on smartphones, adding content to your knowledge base, customizing answer previews, style your FAQ with themes, bring your own theme part 1 and part 2, reusing existing headers.

FAQs on FAQs: Reusing an existing website header

2013-05-07T12:11:00.000-04:00

Welcome back to FAQs on FAQs, a series designed to help you get the most out of your LibraryH3lp-powered FAQ. As previously promised, this installment shows you how to reuse an existing website header within your FAQ. Never fear! The process is straightforward and requires just a bit of template editing.

Reusing a header within your FAQ is a simple yet effective way to blend the FAQ's look and feel seamlessly into your library's existing website. And the results can be very striking such as with Lovejoy Library at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

Let's get started, shall we? After logging into your FAQ site, you'll want to edit your base.html template. And then follow these steps:

1) Comment out the header block using HTML comments. This will look like:


<!--

  {% block header %}

    <div class="navbar">

      <div class="navbar-inner">

        {% include "header.html" %}

      </div>

    </div>

  {% endblock %}

-->

2) Add your header. Just below the commented out header block, add the HTML for your header.

The trickiest part after adding in your header's HTML is getting the styling correct. Your strategy for including the styling for your header elements will vary since there are several ways to handle CSS.

If the CSS is already included directly within each element's style attribute, then you are done.
If the CSS is part of your website's head element, you can copy those styles over to your FAQ's head element.
If the CSS for the header is contained within a CSS file, then you can include that file within your FAQ like this:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://your.library.edu/header.css"/>

One note on option 3 above. If the CSS file includes styling that affects elements outside your custom header, the rest of your FAQ's styling will also be affected. If you run into this scenario, you could ask your webmaster to break up the CSS files or even fall back to option 2 cutting and pasting into your head element what you need. If you need any help straightening this out, please don't hesitate to e-mail us; we've already helped several libraries in this situation.

3) Plug in the FAQ edit controls. Add this just below your custom header HTML:


<!-- FAQ login/logout and edit controls -->

<div class="navbar-inner" style="margin: 0; border:none; padding:0; background:none; min-height:20px; border-radius: none; box-shadow:none;"></div>

That's it! You're done. And since we've covered headers in this installment, we might as well move on to footers for our next installment.

Want to get your own LibraryH3lp-powered FAQ site up and running? Need to import existing content into your FAQ? E-mail us.

Missed a previous installment of FAQs on FAQs? Here are some quick links to help you catch up: real-time chat and e-mail contact options, mobile-specific view for patrons browsing on smartphones, adding content to your knowledge base, customizing answer previews, style your FAQ with themes, bring your own theme part 1 and part 2.

Building grassroots collaboratives with LibraryH3lp

2013-04-30T11:50:00.002-04:00

Dr. S. R. Ranganathan proposed in 1931 that the library is a growing organism. And librarians are a collaborative bunch, frequently corresponding with colleagues and building shared collections and services. With hundreds of libraries using LibraryH3lp every day, there is a fantastic opportunity for collaboration and leveraging cross-institutional expertise to grow your virtual reference service.

Because LibraryH3lp was initially created to serve an after-hours cooperative chat and IM service for students at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Duke University, and North Carolina State University, the capability to collaborate has been built into LibraryH3lp from the very beginning. And because one of our core values is flexibility, collaboration comes in many flavors.

All options below are available even though you and your partnering institution maintain completely separate LibraryH3lp subscriptions. In this way, you can leverage your existing partnerships -- or forge new partnerships -- to extend your virtual reference service wherever possible while maintaining your own local service.

1) Chat with colleagues at other institutions. You can buddy and directly chat with any other LibraryH3lp user (or queue) in the world. Actually, they don't even have to use LibraryH3lp! If your colleagues use chat through Gmail or other XMPP-based services, you can buddy them to your LibraryH3lp account. This is easy to do within your chat client; please refer to our FAQ for details.

2) Transfer patrons between institutions. If your partner institution also uses LibraryH3lp and you often cross-refer patrons, we can can set up targeted cross-institution transfers for any or all of your queues. To invoke another of Ranganathan's laws, save the time of your patrons! They won't need to start their questions over from scratch if you can immediately transfer them to the appropriate place, transcript in hand.

3) Staff a collaborative service using any service model or work flow you'd like. Perhaps you want something very simple, where all participating librarians receive all incoming questions on designated queues and the first librarian to respond wins the chat. Or maybe you are looking for something more nuanced, such as a "home team first" service rollover model. With service rollover, you can serve your own patrons if you're available in the interest of the best, most expedient service possible; otherwise, your patrons are assisted by your trusted colleagues at your partner institution.

How much extra does this stuff cost? Not one penny. Everything is included in your paid annual subscription. That's right, we'll wire up your shiny new collaborative service up for free.

How do I get started? Contact support@libraryh3lp.com and we'll do the necessary under-the-hood configuration needed to get your LibraryH3lp account talking to your partner institution's account. We'll need to know your service goals (transfer only or shared, collaborative staffing), and we'll also need to hear from your partner institution(s) so that we can make sure all parties understand the new service model.

What if I'm interested in a partnership, but have no partner? A good place to start your quest for like minded librarians is the LibraryH3lp Google group.

Quick relevant plug. Would you like to extend your virtual reference service hours, but you don't have a willing partner for staffing longer hours the grassroots way? You can get after-hours coverage through ChatStaff!

FAQs on FAQs: BYOT - Bring Your Own Theme (part 2)

2013-04-23T15:22:00.000-04:00

Welcome back to FAQs on FAQs, a series designed to help you get the most out of your LibraryH3lp-powered FAQ. Last time, we revealed literally hundreds of possibilities for your FAQ site's theme and also covered some of the under-the-hood goodies like icons that automatically change color based on your theme. In this installment, we'll show you how to plug in a third-party Bootstrap theme and how to harness the power of FontAwesome icons.

Plugging in a 3rd party Bootstrap theme is easily accomplished with a bit of template editing. You'll need to edit your base.html template and look for this line within the head element:


<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/themes/{{ theme }}/faq.css"/>

You'll replace that line with two lines that look like this:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/faq.css"/>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://your.server.edu/theme.css"/>

The second stylesheet's href attribute will of course need to be set to reference your custom Bootstrap theme. Easy peasy, right?

One minor complication that you might run into surrounds Bootstrap icons Vs. FontAwesome icons. Chances are that any third-party Bootstrap theme you elect to use will automatically include Bootstrap icons. If there is an easy way to exclude those Bootstrap icons from your theme, then we recommend you do so in preference to FontAwesome. If that isn't possible, no worries, but you'll want to remove these lines in the head element of the base.html template:


<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/font-awesome.min.css"/>

<!--[if IE 7]>

  <link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/font-awesome-ie7.min.css"/>

<![endif]-->

Using FontAwesome icons. FontAwesome makes it super simple to embed tons of icons within your FAQ site. You can place icons anywhere you'd like by creating an i element with a class name which is the same as the icon's name.

E.g. 

In fact, you can do all sorts of things with these icons by adding classes to any i element...

Control size with icon-large, icon-2x, icon-3x, or icon-4x
Add borders with icon-border
Replace list bullets. Looks like this...
<ul class="icons"> <li> Lists</li> </ul>
Animate with icon-spin.¹

So, here's how you'd create a large, bordered book icon that spins:

In the next installment of FAQs on FAQs, we'll show you how make the header for your FAQ site match your library's existing website. Want to get your own LibraryH3lp-powered FAQ site up and running? Need to import existing content into your FAQ? E-mail us.

FAQs on FAQs: BYOT - Bring Your Own Theme (part 1)

2013-04-17T09:05:00.000-04:00

Welcome back to FAQs on FAQs, a series designed to help you get the most out of your LibraryH3lp-powered FAQ. Last time, we covered the 17 pre-configured themes available for your FAQ. In this installment, we reveal even more possibilities and some under-the-hood goodies.

Built with Bootstrap. LibraryH3lp-powered FAQs are built on top of Bootstrap, which is a popular and powerful front-end framework for web development. That means that you get a lot of mileage right out of the box.

Scaffolding supporting grids, layouts, and responsive design.
Attractive typography and styling of basic HTML elements and components.
JavaScript plugins for adding dynamic elements such as tooltips and popovers.

You've already seen all this in action on your FAQ site. And you can take advantage of everything Bootstrap has to offer when customizing your FAQ.

Icons galore. Icons are one key area where we've purposely diverged from Bootstrap. Bootstrap icons are nice, but Font Awesome icons are awesomer. All 249 Font Awesome icons are at your disposal. You've already seen a few of these in action in the right sidebar template. And one really cool thing about font-based icons - they automatically change color with your theme unlike images. Go through the themes again, notice how the icon coloring changes to match the text?

The big reveal. Even more themes. Because Bootstrap is so popular, there are tons of people creating and selling themes for very reasonable prices or even for free. So if one of the 17 pre-configured themes doesn't fit the bill, you have literally hundreds of other pre-made choices. Or you can even create your own.

Next time we'll go into the specifics of how you can leverage Bootstrap, Font Awesome, and custom themes on your FAQ. Have suggestions or ideas for the FAQs on FAQs series? Want to get your own FAQ site up and running? Need to import existing content into your FAQ? E-mail us.

FAQs on FAQs: Style your FAQ with themes

2013-04-09T10:10:00.000-04:00

Welcome back to FAQs on FAQs, a series designed to help you get the most out of your LibraryH3lp-powered FAQ. Previously, we highlighted some template tweaks you can make to customize answer preview content. This time (and in the next few installments) we dive further into FAQ appearance, covering themes and how to do a bit of custom styling.

The easiest way to change the appearance of your FAQ is to change its theme. The video below quickly shows each of the 17 available themes in action on the LibraryH3lp FAQ.

To view a particular theme on your FAQ, append a theme argument to your site's URL. E.g.,

http://NAME.ask.libraryh3lp.com?theme=united

Chances are that one of the themes will blend nicely with your existing color scheme. Once you've selected a theme, shoot us an e-mail and we'll make it your default. But what if the theme is close but needs a little extra tweakage? Then perhaps a bit of CSS (cascading style sheets) will get you there.

For those not familiar with cascading style sheets, the short version is that CSS separates the presentation from the content of a web page. You've already seen CSS in action with each of the themes above; the look and feel changes while content remains the same.

Tweaking a specific element. Let's take the simplest case where there is a specific element you wish to style. Perhaps you want the font color of your answer preview text to be blue. To accomplish that, you'd edit the preview.html template and add a style attribute to the preview paragraph like this:


<p class="question-preview" style="color:blue;">

Tweaking many elements. Congrats, you've officially customized your CSS! No big deal, right? But what if you wanted all the text on all your FAQ pages to be blue? No sweat. You can edit the base.html template to add CSS at the bottom of the head element that looks like this:


<style type="text/css">

  body { color: blue; }

</style>

Now you have two CSS tools in your belt along with an awesome theme. Next time, we'll continue talking CSS and reveal even more theme options. Because 17 isn't near enough, right? :-)

Have suggestions or ideas for the FAQs on FAQs series? Want to get your own FAQ site up and running? Need to import existing content into your FAQ? E-mail us.

FAQs on FAQs: Customizing answer previews

2013-04-02T09:34:00.000-04:00

Welcome back to FAQs on FAQs, a series designed to help you get the most out of your LibraryH3lp-powered FAQ. Last time, we talked about populating your FAQ with content. This time, we're covering a couple customizations that control how your patrons or colleagues (for internal FAQs) see the content you've just added.

Example list of questions with answer previews

The index of your FAQ lists all your questions along with a preview of the answer content sorted by most viewed. Simply scroll down the page to view them all.

Shorten the preview. By default, answer previews are limited to 400 characters and shown in plain text (no HTML markup).

But say you want shorter previews of just 200 characters. You can't go longer, but you can choose anything smaller than 400.

Previews are easily shortened with a bit of template customization. Edit the preview.html template and add a filter after the question.preview variable so it looks like this:


{{ question.preview|truncatechars:200 }}...

Use HTML instead of plain text. Or maybe you don't want plain text for your answer previews; maybe you want your previews to contain styled HTML content. This was a recent topic in the LibraryH3lp Google group and we wanted to share the solution here. Again, this can be done with a bit of editing within the preview.html template. You'll want to make this:


<p class="question-preview">

  {{ question.preview }}...

  <a class="question-popover pull-right" rel="popover" data-original-title="Answer" data-load="/questions/{{ question.id }}/answer" href="/questions/{{ question.id }}">read more <i class="icon-forward"></i></a>

</p>

look like this:


<p class="question-preview" style="overflow:hidden; height:75px;">

  {{ question.answer|safe }}

</p>

<a class="question-popover pull-right" rel="popover" data-original-title="Answer" data-load="/questions/{{ question.id }}/answer" href="/questions/{{ question.id }}">read more <i class="icon-forward"></i></a>

The safe filter for the question.answer variable allows for HTML markup. And the style on the paragraph controls the height of the area allowed for your answer, ensuring any extra content past the specified height is hidden.

Missed a previous installment of FAQs on FAQs? Here are some quick links to help you catch up: real-time chat and e-mail contact options, mobile-specific view for patrons browsing on smartphones, adding content to your knowledge base.

Have suggestions or ideas for the FAQs on FAQs series? Want to get your own FAQ site up and running? Need to import existing content? Let us know!

FAQs on FAQs: Populating your knowledge base

2013-03-27T09:21:00.000-04:00

Welcome to the third installment of FAQs on FAQs, a series designed to help you get the most out of your FAQ. We've already covered the built-in features for your FAQ - real-time chat and e-mail contact options plus the mobile-specific view for patrons browsing on smartphones. Let's switch gears a bit and talk content. After all, what use is a knowledge base without content?

Questions (and associated answers) form the heart of your FAQ site. Every aspect of your FAQ site is already dedicated to helping patrons locate the best answer to their questions. So your job is simply to add content. The more content you provide, the better chance your patrons have for success.

Manage questions and answers directly within your FAQ site via in-place editing.

Add questions using the Add Question button just below your search box.

Edit/delete existing questions using the buttons on the top-right corner of each question.

And no worries about needing to know the nitty gritty of HTML, the question editor provides a rich text interface.

Once your FAQ site is populated with content, your patrons will be able to:

scroll through all questions, organized by most viewed on the main page of your FAQ
click a topic in the tag cloud to scroll through all questions tagged with a particular topic
search by keyword filtered by topic in the search box at the top of every page

Have any suggestions or ideas for the FAQs on FAQs series? Want to get your own FAQ site set up? Let us know!

FAQs on FAQs: Mobile? It's in there!

2013-03-20T14:40:00.000-04:00

Welcome back to FAQs on FAQs, a series designed to help you get the most out of your FAQ site. Last time, we covered the automagic real-time chat and e-mail integrations built into every FAQ site. In this installment, we keep the built-in feature ball rolling and talk mobile.

Mobile patrons on a smart phone automagically see a mobile-specific view of your FAQ site rather than the default desktop view. The mobile view is built-in and works out of the box. No fancy programming required. No hours wasted fiddling. It just works.

Your mobile FAQ has four views - Search, Topics, Browse, and Ask Us. Search provides instant search results for queries. Topics provides a list of topics showing the number of questions tagged with that topic. Browse lists all your questions. Ask Us includes a mobile chat widget and e-mail form so that patrons can contact you.

You can visit your mobile FAQ directly by appending a "/m" to your FAQ's URL.

LibraryH3lp's FAQ: http://ask.libraryh3lp.com
LibraryH3lp's mobile FAQ: http://ask.libraryh3lp.com/m

Have any suggestions for FAQs on FAQs topics? Want to get your own FAQ site going? (Remember, each LibraryH3lp trial and subscription comes with unlimited FAQs at no additional charge!) E-mail support and we'll make it happen. :-)

FAQs on FAQs: chat and e-mail integrations

2013-03-14T12:59:00.000-04:00

Hi all! Lots of you are getting FAQ sites going. Adding questions. Customizing. Branding. We are really impressed by all the creativity!

To help everyone get the most out of their FAQ site (or sites - plural - you get unlimited FAQs at no additional charge with every LibraryH3lp account), we'll blog regularly in the coming weeks about FAQ-related topics - including HTML, CSS, and quite possibly some JavaScript. We're calling the series FAQs on FAQs and hope you will find it a useful source of information and inspiration.

Today's installment covers the automagic chat and e-mail integrations within your FAQ site. Let's go!

Each FAQ site is associated with a queue and an e-mail address, making it easier for patrons to find answers using three communication methods. The FAQs cover pre-canned commonly asked questions. Chat gives patrons real-time access to librarians. E-mail lets patrons ask questions when your virtual reference service is unavailable or if they aren't interested in using chat.

The automagicness happens in two key areas within your FAQ site - the "Ask Us" button and the "Not finding what you need? Contact us!" link at the bottom of every page Both of these elements know when your queue is available, showing chat when virtual reference is available and an e-mail contact form otherwise. No fancy programming needed on your end. It just works.

A third area, the right sidebar, includes separate links for "Real-time chat" and e-mail. This way patrons can see at a glance whether or not the chat service is online. And they can always opt to email instead of chat. The "Real-time chat" link can be customized any way you'd like, and it is not clickable when the chat service is offline.

Want more than just a patron's name, e-mail address, and question when patrons use the e-mail form? Sure! Edit the email.html template and add any additional HTML form field you'd like.

Have any suggestions for the FAQs on FAQs series? Want to get your own FAQ site set up? E-mail support and we'll make it happen. :-)

Scheduled US server downtime morning of Wed, March 13

2013-03-12T15:51:00.000-04:00

We're planning for 15-20 minutes of downtime tomorrow morning (Wednesday, March 13) around 7am Eastern time for our main US server. We are upgrading our database servers to address the root cause of the problem encountered today around 2:40pm Eastern. We will tweet our progress to keep everyone informed. We are sorry for the interruption and thank everyone for their patience!

Important webchat client updates

2013-03-11T11:31:00.000-04:00

Happy Monday! We've rolled out an updated version of our native webchat client. This release includes significant improvements that simplify staffing workflows and increase robustness. Let's take a look!

Flexible queue selection dialog. Have a lot of queues? We've placed a time-saving "Select All/None" checkbox near the top. And if you happen to have a loooooong list of queues, you'll get a scrollbar to more easily navigate the list on a variety of screen sizes.

All/None checkbox on queue selection dialog.

New questions appear behind active conversations. New chats can't "jump to the front of the line" by hijacking typing focus from a current chat. Incoming chat windows appear behind existing chat windows.

Auto-reconnect. The webchat client does a better job of cleanly reconnecting after brief network dropouts.

Attention-grabbing disconnect alerts. When network problems totally disconnect you from our server, we'll alert you with the familiar "sonar ping" sound on a 30 second loop. And if you have Desktop Notifications enabled in Firefox or Chrome, you'll also receive a visual alert in the same style that you would for an incoming chat, even if you have the webchat client minimized or hidden behind other applications.

Desktop alert above system tray showing disconnect.

Character counter for SMS questions appears all the time, not just when composing. It's a bright orange 140 character countdown in the top right conversation window corner that only shows up for SMS messages. The webchat client has had it since the beginning, but until now, it only showed up when the librarian was actively typing. Now it is there all the time, as a further alert that you've got someone texting, in addition to an optional special queue avatar.

Orange character countdown for SMS in top right corner.
This queue also has a special cell phone avatar for further
alerting that the patron is texting.

LibraryH3lp mobile widgets are Boopsie compatible

2013-01-30T08:00:00.000-05:00

In a recent post, we talked a bit about how widgets have URLs. Just a quick follow-up for those of you thinking of or already using Boopsie. Our mobile widgets are Boopsie compatible!

Do you use other products you'd like to see integrated with LibraryH3lp? Send us an e-mail or leave a comment below and we'll see what we can do!

New! In-place FAQ Editing

2013-01-24T12:08:00.000-05:00

Starting today, you can edit your templates and FAQs directly in your FAQ site. In-place editing provides good visual feedback and streamlines workflow. You can see changes instantly and make use of the powerful search feature to edit existing questions. This update is in place on all LibraryH3lp servers and My Customer Cloud.

To get started editing your FAQ, you'll need to login. Your FAQ site will pick up any existing login from the admin site or the webchat client. There is also a very small, subtle icon at the top right corner of your FAQ page that you can use to login. We went with subtle since you probably won't want your patrons to notice it.

edit & logout icons

Once you're logged in, you'll see a small pencil icon in the top right corner, along with a logout icon. The pencil icon lets you turn on editing mode. From there, you hover over portions of your FAQ site to see the edit controls for editing templates and content.

There is more to come. Soon, you'll have tools that will let you create additional FAQ sites within a single account. You'll be able to have a mix of public-facing and authentication-required FAQs. And, you'll be able to fully manage user permissions.

If you have any troubles editing your FAQ, want to create a new (or additional) FAQ, or want to change FAQ-wide settings (CNAME, theme, queue, e-mail, authentication required), please e-mail support.

Did you know that your LibraryH3lp widget has its own URL?

2013-01-23T11:49:00.000-05:00

The most common ways of embedding LibraryH3lp chat widgets on a web page is via code snippets or iframes. But if you strip back all the HTML and JavaScript, a widget boils down to a simple URL.

Widget URLs take patrons to your Ask a Librarian service with a single click and may be more effective in boosting engagement than only advertising links to your Ask a Librarian page.

Widget URLs follow this format on the main US server:

widget attached to a queue:
https://libraryh3lp.com/chat/QUEUE-NAME@chat.libraryh3lp.com
widget attached to a user*:
https://libraryh3lp.com/chat/USERNAME@libraryh3lp.com

We auto-detect mobile devices and send them a mobile-friendly widget, so you can tweet regular widget URLs to your patrons who are more likely to be on a smart device. But, here are what our mobile widget URLs look like, in case you'd like to see them on a regular computer:

mobile widget attached to a queue:
https://libraryh3lp.com/mobile/QUEUE-NAME@chat.libraryh3lp.com
mobile widget attached to a user*:
https://libraryh3lp.com/mobile/USERNAME@libraryh3lp.com

Widget URLs for regionals are very similar. Prepend the regional abbreviation (ca, eu, sg) to libraryh3lp.com in two places. An example for the Canadian regional server:

https://ca.libraryh3lp.com/chat/QUEUE-NAME@chat.ca.libraryh3lp.com.

And if you want to pimp out your widget, add some arguments to your URL.

*Note: chats for specific users are treated as private conversations and are not logged, so they will not show up in Activity or Reports. They also can't be transferred. To provide logging and transfer capabilities for an individual, create a queue and assign only that one user to it.

New Tag for Followup email behavior

2013-01-23T10:13:00.000-05:00

We've simplified the 'Tag for Followup' feature in the webchat client, making it more fine-grained and easier to set up¹. This change is currently only live on the main US server; it is not yet on the regional servers in Canada, Europe, and Singapore.

[Update Jan 23, 2012: This update is also now on the regional servers in Canada, Europe, and Singapore.]

Quick feature review: Tag for Followup facilitates later followup on questions that can't be answered during the chat session by e-mailing the chat transcript (along with optional note).

The simplification lies in which email addresses are used.

The email address set for the queue (Queues tab in admin site) will receive Tagged messages, with one caveat. If the patron's chat widget specified a profile argument, then the email address for the profile's queue will be used instead of the queue's email.
The operator that clicks Tag for Followup will always receive a copy of a Tagged message, if that operator has an email address defined in the Users tab.

To ease the transition to the new, easier method, we auto-populated queue emails system-wide.

If the queue already had an email set, we left it alone.
If no queue email was available, we used the email set in the Users tab for the user that owned the queue.
If no queue or queue owner email was available, we used the email set in the Users tab for the top-level admin user.
If no queue, queue owner, or top-level admin email was available, we used the contact email from time of account registration.

You can use the Queues tab in the admin site to view and change these pre-populated email addresses. And, if we have auto-populated your queues with email addresses and you would prefer to start with a blank slate, please email our support account; we can reset them to empty to save you some clicking.

If you have a lot of queues and you're a bit of a power user, you might find it handy to use our API to retrieve a list of your queues and associated settings. You can retreive a list using your web browser. First, login to the admin website with your top-level admin user. Then, visit the following URL: https://libraryh3lp.com/2011-12-03/queues

Still to come: the ability to see which chats were Tagged for Followup in the Activity area.

¹Previously, Tag for Followup emailed the top-level admin user (typically this is the email account used to initially register the account) and any admin-equivalents. It also emailed any email address provided in the user properties in the admin site for the queue owner AND the operator involved in the chat.

Using Summon? Integrate your LibraryH3lp chat service!

2012-12-03T09:47:00.000-05:00

Big news! You can now integrate your LibraryH3lp chat service within Summon®.

The new LibraryH3lp integration is part of a larger suite of new features to provide contextual research assistance in the Summon Discovery Service. Within Summon Suggestions, "embedded chat and reference widgets allow users to receive real-time help from reference staff without leaving the Summon user interface. Libraries can seamlessly integrate and customize chat and reference widgets in the Summon environment with easy to use administration tools."

To learn more, check out the Summon documentation. And if you run into any snags, the fine folks at Serials Solutions® customer support are available to help.

Do you use other products you'd like to see integrated with LibraryH3lp? Send us an e-mail or leave a comment below and we'll see what we can do!

Library chat surveys, University of Minnesota Duluth style

2012-11-19T07:37:00.000-05:00

Interested in using surveys to improve your library's virtual reference services? In this
post, we've partnered with the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD) Library to talk
library surveys. (Thanks guys!) They've been using surveys alongside chat this year and have interesting and actionable results to share with you.

At the end of this post, we'll cover the mechanics of adding a survey to your widget. But first up, Doreen Hansen, Computer Systems Specialist, along with UMD Librarians Kim Pittman and Gabriel Gardner will take you behind the scenes to share how they apply survey results within their library to improve library services.

A Tale of Two Surveys: How and Why

UMD Reference Librarians first offered chat service to patrons in 2004. After joining
forces with LibraryH3lp in 2008, we saw a significant increase in usage. However, after
that initial spike, our usage numbers began to stagnate (see charts). In order to uncover
the cause of our underwhelming usage statistics, we surveyed our patrons in the spring
and summer of 2012. We hoped that our survey results would give us insight into
users’ experience of chat and help us identify areas for improvement.

In order to learn more about current chat users and non-users, we created two surveys, both launched in the spring of 2012.

One was linked right inside the top header of the patron's chat box via the <title> field within the widget designer. In addition to this eye-catching survey link, librarians also sent patrons a friendly invitation to take a short survey at the conclusion of each chat.

This survey asked the user to rate their satisfaction with several aspects of their chat experience, offer suggestions for service improvements, and rate their willingness to use the service again.

Our second, more comprehensive survey was targeted to anyone, whether they were previous chat users, were unaware of the chat service, or had known about it but hadn't tried it. This survey posed questions to patrons about their awareness of the service, previous use and satisfaction (if applicable), reasons for non-use (if applicable) and demographic characteristics. We promoted this survey in three places: on our library home page, on our "AskUs!" page, and on the digital sign at the library’s entrance.

UMD Library home page with link to survey in lower left corner.

Closeup of survey link

We chose to use Google Drive to create these surveys because of its simplicity, shareability, and the snazzy charts that we could easily produce from our results. Using Google Drive also allowed us to create a “branching” survey which led users to different questions based on their responses. To our knowledge, Google Drive is currently the only free survey software with this capability.

How We Used Our Results

Dropped Chats: Embedded vs. Pop-out Widgets

After launching the survey, one problem became clear immediately: our embedded widgets were causing us to lose some users mid-conversation. Patrons would click a link sent by librarians or perhaps leave or refresh the page, losing their connection. While we had suspected that this might be the case, our survey results confirmed this. Switching all our widgets from embedded to pop-out was an easy fix, resulting in a notable decline in the number of lost connections and survey complaints.

Response Time

After compiling survey results, we noted other common issues experienced by users. Several users commented that librarians were slow to respond to their questions - an issue confirmed by our LibraryH3lp statistics. In order to improve this aspect of our service, we plan to discuss user expectations at future librarian training meetings, and explore options for providing back-up chat coverage should the librarian staffing the desk become too busy to answer promptly.

Lack of User Awareness

Given our declining chat usage, we were unsurprised to find that the majority of those surveyed had not previously used our chat service. Of those non-users, approximately half were not aware that the service existed. To address this lack of awareness, we are in the process of putting more widgets where our users are: our databases, online research guides, 404 pages, and our course management system, Moodle. In the future, we hope to add widgets to our mobile site (using LibraryH3lp’s mobile widget) and our link resolver pages.

In addition to adding more widgets, we are strategizing new promotional efforts across campus to increase awareness of our chat service. This may include posting fliers in the dorms, advertising in our campus student newspaper, and redoubling our efforts to promote our chat service in library instruction sessions.

example of a meme used in our promotional flyer

another example of a promotional meme

Adding a survey link to your widget

Now that Doreen, Kim, and Gabriel have got you all excited about using surveys to improve your library's services, let's talk about how you can add a link to your survey in your widget's title.

The simplest way to do this is to include a hyperlink as part of your widget's title. For example:


Ask a Librarian
<span style="float:right; text-align: center; font-size: 12px;">How did we do?<br/><a href="http://link-to-survey">Let us know!</a></span>

Ask Us! <span style="padding:4px;background:#ff0;color:#032b3c"> Take our <a target="_blank" style="color:#032b3c" href="http://z.umn.edu/chatsurvey">brief chat survey</a></span>

And if your title needs more room, you can add a wicked CSS hack. For example:


#layout {

  top: 40px;

}

The result should look something like this:

And here is the University of Minnesota Duluth Libraries' widget with survey link:

How does your library use surveys?

Do you use surveys (chat or otherwise) to improve your library's services? Or maybe you have questions for Doreen, Kim, and Gabriel? If so, please post a comment. We'd love to hear from you!

FAQ on regional servers + New password protection feature!

2012-11-13T10:09:00.000-05:00

Our FAQ module is now available on the LibraryH3lp servers in Europe, Canada, and Singapore, in addition to our main US server.

The FAQ module lets you quickly and easily build a searchable, browsable knowledge base for your library. Plus, real-time chat and an offline e-mail form are automatically integrated so that patrons can get answers directly from you. It's one more thing included at no additional charge with your unlimited, low flat-rate LibraryH3lp subscription. More bang for your buck. Better virtual reference service for your patrons.

And now for that new feature. Each FAQ offers the option of password protection so that only your librarians have access to your knowledge base. A couple LibraryH3lp libraries were interested in using the FAQ as an internal knowledge base for librarians rather than as a resource for patrons. We thought that was a fantastic idea! To enable password protection for your FAQ, click on the 'Require login?' checkbox in the Pages tab of the FAQ module in the admin site.

We want to hear from you! Build your own FAQ. Try it out. Collect feedback from your librarians and patrons and let us know how we can make it better for you.

Oh! And one last thing. If you are building a FAQ and don't mind sharing, please leave a link to your FAQ in the comments below. We've been getting quite a few requests to see what other libraries are doing with their FAQs. We'd appreciate any inspiration you'd care to share.

New feature for patrons! Searchable FAQ

2012-09-18T10:49:00.000-04:00

[Update: Edit your LibraryH3lp FAQ in place rather than via the admin site.]

Exciting news: your LibraryH3lp subscription or trial is now 100% more awesome. Today, we released a knowledge base feature as part of LibraryH3lp (on the main U.S. server only so far) that lets you quickly and easily build a searchable, browsable FAQ for your library. Plus, real-time chat and an offline e-mail form are automatically integrated so that patrons can get answers directly from you.

The great thing about a FAQ is that it saves time for both librarians and patrons by providing thorough answers to commonly asked questions, questions often encountered when chatting with patrons online. Now you can combine real-time chat with a browsable FAQ to provide a richer virtual reference experience for your patrons.

What does it look like?

Visit our shiny new LibraryH3lp FAQ to see an example in action. There is even a built-in mobile-specific version for smart phones. Which version patrons see depends on the device browsing the FAQ. And yes, your FAQ comes automatically with a mobile specific version too!

Screenshot of our FAQ demo site

The FAQ is comprised of three basic types of pages. Each type of page has an instant search at the top, contact information to the right, and a tag cloud of topics to the right. The primary page contains all of your questions. Yup. Keep scrolling. They're all there. Or you can look at all questions tagged with a particular topic. To see that in action, click a topic in the tag cloud on the right. Topics are a handy way to categories the various types of questions. And finally, there are individual question pages.

You can see of the number of views for each question and the last updated time stamp indicating answer "freshness." And there is a built-in social component as well. Vote a question up as useful (a like) or down (a dislike) as not useful and see a tally of the likes and dislikes from other viewers.

Look and feel for the FAQ is highly customizable. You have access to all the underlying templates used to create the three basic types of pages, giving you complete control over the look of your own FAQ site. Restructure and build upon the default templates as needed to best suit your needs. But you don't have to start from scratch, we also offer 12 preconfigured themes for your FAQ. You can see each of the themes in action in our LibraryH3lp FAQ. To switch between themes, use the drop-down menu in the upper right-hand corner. Pam likes Spacelab. Eric digs Journal. Amy prefers Superhero.

How do I build my own?

There are two tabs available within the new FAQs tab of the admin site - Questions and Pages. Use these to manage your questions and customize your pages respectively.

The Questions tab shows a tabular listing of all your questions. You can add, edit, and remove questions. Plus you can see the number of views, likes, dislikes, last update date, and topics for each question. You can do keyword searches to easily find existing questions you'd like to edit, and you can sort by any column heading.

The Pages tab is where you control the look and feel of your site. Choose your theme, select the queue you want chats directed to, and enter an email address for offline queries, and you're all set. You also have complete control over your site's HTML in the Templates area, if you need it.

We take care of the hosting and your FAQ gets its own address, shown on the Pages tab as Site. Also on the Pages tab, you can enter a custom URL for your site within your own domain as a CNAME. This means that instead of your patrons seeing your FAQ URL as "something.ask.libraryh3lp.com," you can show them something using your own domain instead, for example, "faq.myschool.edu." Your network administrator will be able to help out with the needed DNS tweaking on your library's end. More documentation.

Making the FAQ better.

All of the basics are there. We have lots of ideas for improvements, but we also want to hear from you! Build your own FAQ. Try it out. Collect feedback from your librarians and patrons and let us know how we can make it better for you.

And finally, the best part of all is that there is no fine print or gotchas. It's just one more thing you get with your unlimited, low flat-rate LibraryH3lp subscription. More bang for your buck. Better virtual reference service for your patrons.

Recent U.S. server downtime

2012-09-10T07:21:00.000-04:00

Customers using the main U.S. server were affected by server instability on Tuesday and Wednesday of last week brought on by high load. Wednesday's downtime severely impacted our customers' ability to chat with patrons during peak use hours. We understand that you rely on us to provide stable services so you in turn can provide a high quality of virtual reference for your patrons. We sincerely apologize for the disruption during this hectic time of year and thank everyone for their kind patience while we worked to correct the issue. Last Wednesday night, we released an infrastructure upgrade to our main U.S. server designed to greatly enhance our long-term stability, performance, and ability to scale quickly in advance of future crises.

The infrastructure changes are part of a long-term plan to improve performance and fault-tolerance by way of redundant systems distributed across the network. Because the migration to the new architecture was already in-progress, we were able to complete the restructuring by the end of the day on Wednesday and get chat back on track as quickly as possible. Additional servers were added Friday morning to enhance performance.

We take great pride that our server uptime over the last year is 99.91% (including the downtime last week) which is above the industry average of 99%. These changes will ensure our continued high availability moving forward so that you are able to provide the best quality of service for your patrons.

New to LibraryH3lp? Here's a roadmap.

2012-07-12T11:55:00.000-04:00

Coming to LibraryH3lp from another chat system, you may feel that your administrative user interface has suddenly transformed from:

To something more like:

We don't deny that LibraryH3lp has lots of features, but it is not as complicated as it may appear at first glance. Yes, we have more buttons, dials, levers, and switches, but they each exist for a very specific purpose, and together they work to provide your patrons with the simplicity of "Push for Cheese". Here is a walkthrough of the core concepts.

Fundamentally, of course, is the widget - that box you stick in a web page that the user can type in to chat with you in real-time. In single-operator systems like Meebo, a widget corresponds exactly to one user: you have one login, and this is used to sign in and answer chats. If you share the login among multiple people, things get a little weird because all of the guest-side messages go out to all of the people using that single account. There's no need to further review the other shortcomings of this setup, as you've experienced them, but it is easy to understand and setup.

Building on that, multi-operator systems like LibraryH3lp break the one-to-one limitation of single-account systems like Meebo. You still have a widget, but you can have multiple user operators, all of whom can answer chats without tripping over each other. This is a popular arrangement because it is a lot more powerful to use and only slightly more challenging to deploy. The weaknesses of this system center primarily on organization. But LibraryH3lp has organizational knobs too.

From the patron's external point-of-view, you're a library, but of course internally you have branches and departments, individuals, and specialties. When the patron contacts the "library" (via chat, phone, or email), job one is to direct him or her the individual or department best suited to provide help.

To facilitate this, LibraryH3lp breaks the concept of a widget into two pieces: a widget and a queue. The widget is still a box on your web page, and the queue specifies the target or destination of the chat. Another way to think of a queue is as a tag or a label. Some librarians are reference librarians, some are science specialists... some are even both. Queues are a way to organize your users. So you can have a widget in your page that targets your circulation or reference queue, but when an ILL question comes in you can transfer that chat to your ILL queue (tag/label) so the patron receives the most appropriate help. Because widgets and queues are separate, this works whether the chat comes in from the web, IM, or SMS.

Of course, once you've organized your users into queues, you shouldn't need to setup a "chat dispatch" operator who answers and routes chats. That's silly... let the computer do it, that's what it's for. And that is what we call a service. It's a way to describe how to route the chat to the most appropriate operator. You can say, in effect, if any of my science librarians are online right now, send the chat to them. Otherwise send the chat to the reference desk so they can help as best they can. If none of my librarians are available for chat, send the patron to my after hours backup service or to my email form.

With all the knobs comes flexibility. Instead of just a user and a widget, we give you any number of users to answer chats, queues to organize your users, widgets to display in your web pages, and services to ensure that your patrons get the best help possible.

Most importantly, you don't need to worry about any of that if you don't want to. When you signup for LibraryH3lp, we set you up with one service, one widget, one queue, and one user, in a way that is functionally nearly identical to a Meebo setup. And we send you a code snippet in your welcome letter to do all of this. Once you've put that code into your web pages, you can learn what the knobs do later and never have to make any code changes. That's as close to "Push for Cheese" as any nuclear power plant can get.

New Services Designer (plus handy tip for creating tutorials)

2012-07-09T14:27:00.002-04:00

With LibraryH3lp's new Services Designer, it's even easier to create code snippets for embedding chat widgets into your website!

Why snippets? With a single snippet, you can:

Associate widgets with queues, to give your chat entry points the right look and feel.
Customize how your chat service looks when offline.
Add custom HTML code before or after your chat widget.
Easily switch between our three widget types.
Create Service Rollover, if desired.
Make changes from within the admin site without modifying your web pages!

Code snippets can be pasted into your web pages, LibGuides, and pretty much any place that accepts HTML and JavaScript. Our code snippets are optimized for speed and won't interfere with loading of your larger web pages.

Once a code snippet is deployed, you can make changes to the look and feel of your chat service solely through the LibraryH3lp admin site. (Hopefully, your IT department won't start to think that you don't like them anymore since you can do everything yourself.)

Services Designer Tutorial (powered by iorad)

With a new tool comes new documentation, and we tried a new-to-us tool (iorad) to quickly get a tutorial for the new Services Design up and running.

View our Tutorial powered by iorad!

Creating traditional screencasts with movies and voice-overs can be pretty tedious and time-consuming. Ditto when making pages with lots of screenshots and explanatory text. And as instructional services librarian-types know, it's always a challenge to keep a tutorial audience engaged. The focus of iorad is to remove all the drudgery between you and educating your audience.

Tutorials made with iorad are definitely faster to build. It captures screenshots for you as you click through your tasks, and later lets you annotate them. The thing that makes these tutorials so effective is that your audience mimics your clicks as they work through the material, for better active learning. Yes, you can do that with clickable callouts in most screencast creation software, but iorad makes it a lot faster.

Though not totally without issues, it's pretty darn neat! Let us know what you think about this tutorial and if you'd like to see another on some particular topic.

Zawinski's Law: LibraryH3lp, now with 100% more email

2012-06-28T10:48:00.000-04:00

(See.)

I think Pam and Amy are all blogged-out, so it falls on me to tell you about our new email integration features. No, we have not written yet another email reference tool, and let's hope it doesn't come to that. Instead, we've made it easier to combine LibraryH3lp with your existing email service.

First up, a quick note that these new features are on top of our existing email integration, Tag for Followup. Tag for Followup is in the webchat client and lets operators send a transcript and explanatory note easily, without specifying a particular email address. It transparently emails the operator involved in the chat, the owner of the queue, and the top-level admin, so that the referral can get handled. [Edit: Tag for Followup has been improved since this post was published.] If the operator wants to target a specific email address, that's what email transcript is for.

Over the years we've noticed that occasionally patrons will email questions to queues. This is understandable given that XMPP Jabber IDs look like email addresses, and services like Google and Facebook encourage users to conflate the two. We want these questions to get to you. By default, queues are opted out of email forwarding. To opt in, you need only define a forwarding email address for your queue in the admin site. Then anything sent to the queue will be sent on to you.

We've also noticed that patrons will all too often mistype their email address when sending themselves a transcript of their chat session. Apparently "edu" is about as hard to type correctly as "the" ("edg" is a popular variation). Who would have thought? We want you to be able to catch these errors and fix them, without us storing any patron-identifying information. Even though today's students prefer chat for communication, email still plays an important role in archival storage.

To catch bounces, transcripts are now sent from the queue, using VERP. This way, bounces will go back to the queue and on to your forwarding address, with the patron's alleged email address clearly visible in the "from" line. (The point of VERP is that there is no standard for bounces, and the patron may be using their own email forwarding service, so this is the only reliable way to determine where the message was intended to go.) Oh, and emails will respect the "profile" argument, so bounces and replies can be directed to the most appropriate specialist.

As a bonus, patrons can now directly reply to emailed transcripts in order to continue the conversation... which I guess means we'll be joining with Google and Facebook in encouraging users to confuse JIDs and email addresses. This falls under the category of "if you can't beat 'em..."

Because this is email, a few words about spam are in order. Yes, patrons sometimes send email to queues. Spammers frequently send email to queues, because they scrape the Jabber IDs out of your web pages. If you use our new-style code, as produced by the service designer, this will not be an issue. Either way, our server does spam and virus filtering on all email before forwarding it to you. (But if the filtering is not sufficient, you can always opt back out of email forwarding.)

Also, as desirable as it would be to email transcripts "from" your email address rather than "queue@chat.libraryh3lp.com", that's a recipe for getting flagged as spam and would cause problems with getting transcripts to patrons. The flip side of that is bounces (failed attempts to deliver to patrons) may well get delivered to your spam folder, depending on the particulars of your email server. (This is because sending fake bounce messages is a known spam technique, and that's what these emails look like, but safety and convenience have been at war with each other since networking was invented.) In this case, we're choosing the patron's convenience over yours.

Anyway, there you have it: LibraryH3lp, now with 100% more email.

New feature! Staff from other XMPP accounts for even more flexibility

2012-06-25T08:56:00.001-04:00

In our last couple of posts, we've talked about how flexibility is one of the overarching design goals in LibraryH3lp. Two major ingredients in our recipe for flexibility are the ability to create any number of operator accounts at no extra cost and the variety of staffing clients available thanks to our use of the XMPP protocol.

Today, we've just introduced a new ingredient to the recipe! Now, you can staff your LibraryH3lp service from any XMPP (Jabber) account, not just your LibraryH3lp account. So not only do you have an array of clients available to use when staffing LibraryH3lp, you now have an array of accounts to choose from as well.

Use your own XMPP server. If your institution has its own internal XMPP server, you can use your internal chat accounts to answer LibraryH3lp chats. This way, your librarians can use their institutional account to do their chat work, but you can also take advantage of LibraryH3lp widgets, multi-operator routing, IM gateways, and other features. You could even opt to store chat logs only on your own server, leaving transcript storage disabled on the LibraryH3lp server, for reasons of internal data storage policies. And, since we have SSL, you can opt to encrypt all of your widget chats over HTTPS if you wish, leading to a very secure chat solution.

Staff from other XMPP accounts. You can use any other XMPP account, such as Google Talk inside Gmail.

LibraryH3lp chat for the 'pamq' queue arriving via Google Talk in Gmail.

Greater mobile staffing flexibility. Use mobile apps on iPads, other tablets, or smart phones connected to your LibraryH3lp account or any other XMPP account that you have. For mobile apps with XMPP support, we really like both IM+ and OneTeam; they're nice apps with reliable push notifications.

How do I set it up? Using the admin site, admins can add external accounts for their users in the Users tab. Each user now has an option for External Staffing. You just need to supply the JID (Jabber ID) for the external account. Remember that a JID always includes a domain. For example, the JID for a regular Google Talk account is username@gmail.com.

How do I test it out? Once the external account has been added as an external staffing option via the admin site, you're ready to test. Sign in to the external account using the chat client of your choice and look for the prompt to authorize the contact request or buddy request for chat.libraryh3lp.com. Once that is approved and the chat.libraryh3lp.com contact appears online, you can use a LibraryH3lp widget to send your first test chat. Once you approve the request for the incoming chat, you'll be able to see your guest's status and carry on a regular LibraryH3lp chat.

The usual statuses apply. Set yourself to Busy or Do Not Disturb to continue working with active chats but not be routed any new ones. Set yourself to Away to deflect incoming chats for queues.

Some Q & A:

Can I still transfer chats if I'm using an external account? Yes, absolutely. You'll get the regular link to the LibraryH3lp chat management page at the start of each chat. From there, you can transfer, send the patron a file, or email a transcript of the chat.

Can I still receive transfers using an external account? Yes. For transfers, you'll appear to other users under your regular LibraryH3lp account. So if you are pamsessoms in LibraryH3lp and that is linked to psessoms@gmail.com, you'll continue to show up as pamsessoms in the transfer lists even if you're using psessoms@gmail.com to staff the service.

What if one of my users leaves him/herself logged into an external account by accident? You can opt their account out of any queues from within the admin site to prevent them from holding any queues open.

Can I login with both my LibraryH3lp account and the linked external account at the same time? Yes. In fact, that brings up a neat use case. Let's say you started to answer an interesting in-depth question using your mobile device, and you want to continue it on a computer with a regular keyboard. You can easily login with your LibraryH3lp account in our webchat client (or any other client) and continue the chat from there, where it is easier to type. No need to transfer the chat. Set yourself to 'away' on your mobile device, and when the guest sends the next message, you'll receive it at your new location.

Can I somehow auto-approve the buddy request on incoming chats? For now, only if your chat client or your external XMPP server has such a setting. Some clients, such as Adium, have this setting as an option, and others do not. Since you're using someone else's XMPP server, that standard behavior will probably be in effect. It usually just takes one click/tap to approve these requests. However, we have future plans to work around this by having you pre-approve a few guest aliases that will be recycled.

Will I see my usual LibraryH3lp buddy list when using an external account? No. Buddy lists are per-account, so you'll see the buddy list associated with the account on the server you are using. However, since XMPP works cross-domain, you can certainly buddy any LibraryH3lp accounts you'd like by adding them in the usual way (username@libraryh3lp.com).

I don't want my staff to do this. How can I prevent them from enabling this feature? The ability to add external accounts is limited to admins. Your users won't be able to set this up on their own unless they have admin rights in your LibraryH3lp setup. The admin can add an external account for any user.

This feature is available on the main (US) server now; coming to the servers in Canada, Europe, and Singapore soon.