(125) Reenvisioning a Reference Service: Cleaning Up and Moving Forward to Improve Services and Workflows

Background: In 2017, the AskUs reference service on an academic medical campus transitioned from being a department wide endeavour to being the primary responsibility of the newly hired Reference Librarian. In 2017, AskUs included answering reference questions via telephone, chat, text, email, and for walk-in patrons, scheduling consultations in the Education and Reference Department, and receiving professional search requests for the Professional Literature Search Team. The majority of these services and their data were contained within the Springshare LibAnswers platform. The addition of this librarian role allowed for the opportunity to reevaluate our services and implement changes and improvements.

Description: This poster will present the practical changes that were made to the AskUs reference service from 2017 - 2019 and the associated data for each change. When hired in 2017, the Reference Librarian began by evaluating the data collected from the service from 2012, when LibAnswers was implemented in the library, to 2017 to understand where inefficiencies and opportunities were. Four initiatives were undertaken from Fall 2017 to Fall 2019 including: changing data collection methods and type of data collected to gather more usable information; revitalizing a previous initiative to utilize the FAQ functionality in LibAnswers; implementing the use of LibCal’s Appointments scheduler for all members of the Education and Reference department who provide consultations; and implementing proactive chat on the library homepage and LibGuides.

Conclusion: The initiatives undertaken to improve AskUs have had varying levels of success. Final data is still pending, but initial results show that our most impactful changes have been the implementation of LibCal Appointments for scheduling consultations and proactive chat. Majority of the Education and Reference department adopted LibCal Appointments for scheduling consultations in May 2019 and there has been a decrease in the number of transactions needed to schedule patrons, which indicates there will also be a time savings. Activation of LibChat’s proactive chat feature has increased chat activity by 614% for a sample time period in 2018 and 2019.