Tips (General)

Did you know that the AskAway Wiki has:

If anyone gets a question from a UBC student researching women in rural areas during the great depression, send her to JSTOR!
There's a bijillion articles with the Basic search: women rural "great depression"
She gets a lost connection fairly quickly, but once she knows where to search, she'll be fine.
Thanks
- Niki

Since the public library "side" of AskAway is still behind a picket line, we may see a few questions from public library patrons. Here are a few tools that you can use to help them:
Public Libraries' Delicious bookmarks:
http://del.icio.us/askaway
For those of you not familiar with Delicious, use the Tags on the right side of the screen to select a topic, e.g. Climate_Change
Then, select a link from the left side of the screen.
List of Free (academic) databases:

Scenario: You're online, and a new question comes up. You go to answer it, and another librarian, who already has a question, gets there first.
Why have they grabbed two (or more) questions, when you don't have any?
It could be that this librarian has a "mad disconnecter" - that is, a patron who keeps losing their internet connection, and returning to the service. The librarian may not have time to close all of those lost calls, or they may need to keep them open for reference.
How can you determine if your colleague has a mad disconnecter, or is being swamped?

At the request of a service provider, we've added a new script to our arsenal: Begin - Transcript. The scripts reads:

Don't worry about writing all this information down. At the end of our session you’ll have the option of receiving a transcript of our conversation, along with all the URLs we visited.

A few changes have been made to the Guest Logins page. These changes reflect issues that have been reported with guest logins. Please remember to click Refresh on your browser to retrieve the newest version.