Out of this world: 24/7 Online Chat The University of South Wales Ann Cross & Lou Wallace

“I live a long way from the University and am an MSc "online" student “I live a long way from the University and am an MSc "online" student. Really needed the paper which the chat service operator really helped me with. Great service-thank you” “I tried all weekend to find a paper on FINDit but within 10 minutes of using this service I have the paper printed out” “This is such a great service - can you please feed that back to the uni or is there someone I can contact?! It's twice now I have been able to sort a problem from home which, with small children is far easier than having to come in” “much better - i'm always too shy to use the phone, i get scared talking to people” “The chat system is extremely helpful when stuck at home and needing to place a booking etc. So friendly to talk with and answers questions in as much detail as they can!! Definitely recommend” “The librarian who handled my query was very professional and expert. She knew the answer to many questions, knew where to look for others (and did so in real time)”

So with our daytime chat going along nicely we decided we wanted a new challenge ... well there was a bit more to it than that. USW is increasing its online and distance learning courses, we have seen increasing numbers of part time students using our services out of hours and emailing our information Librarians out of hours and our Treforest library is 24/7. Alongside this the University Academic Plan talks about supporting flexible study so extending our chat service to 24/7 seemed to be a good idea and means we are able to offer an enquiry service whenever our students need it. The SCONUL virtual out of hours service was piloted by the Northern Collaboration Library Consortium from May 2013 to July 2014. Following the successful pilot SCONUL consulted with members and agreed with OCLC to offer the service to all members in 2016. The service is staffed by Librarians in the States overnight during their daytime and a UK OCLC representative takes over early in the morning when they have all gone home! We looked at the report of the pilot which was very positive and just as with our daytime chat the qualitative data was outstanding. We also contacted some of the pilot institutions to affirm this. We looked at the SCONUL Offer and technical information to determine whether it was something within our capabilities and decided in November to join the second tranche of institutions to implement the scheme in January. It was really down to the hard work and dedication of my colleague here that we made that deadline.

Policy Page Widget Training

Policy Page

Widgetry

Our first chat!

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“That was fab, thankyou. Thankyou…so helpful” “Thank you for your help – thank goodness for this out of hours chat service. “thank you im pretty amazed someone from New York has answered my question about a Newport library in real time” They have been a life saver when you work full-time and study part time” “I am glad the school created this online Library Service” “You’re a lifesaver. I’d be needing blooming therapy. Thanks again”

Challenges Quality control Help Time OCLC support Referrals Feedback Form Reporting tool

Moving Forward What do we plan to do next? We are piloting the service for a year and we will evaluate it for value for money in December before making a decision to continue. We have learnt a number of things by offering the out of hours service which we feel will benefit our daytime service for example we are going to adopt a common opening and closing protocol similar to that used in the out of hours service. We are also thinking about applying the subject codes to our daytime chat so that we can do more comparisons and to enable us to report more fully on our whole chat service. We now want to evaluate our daytime chat tool in the light of working with the OCLC chat tool and maybe move to a chat tool with more functionality such as reporting features The out of hours service allows us to set up some scripted messages to use in referral responses which we could also use in our day time service. As well as extending the service to our users for a very reasonable cost it has also led us to reflect and think a bit more about developing our day time chat service So all things considered it has been a very positive service development.

Any Questions?

Thanks for listening Images & Video Slide 2: www.libraryh3lp.com Slide 4 www.sconul.org; www.oclc.org.questionpoint.en Side 6,7,10: www.oclc.org.questionpoint.en Slide 8: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq3qWYLki3yXhJ1NHDmDWZg Slide 16: https://singersworld.wikispaces.com/C1 Slide 17: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Desert_road_UAE.JPG