24/7 Reference Software--Training Begins

Today we met with Carol from 24/7 Reference for the better part of the afternoon. Today's training was set for administrative staff. We covered setting up accounts, usernames and screen names, policy pages, scheduling, global vs. local coverage, training, and much of the logistics in administering the service. At today's training was Jeremy, the District's trainer; Susan, Electronic Resource Librarian, me (Web/Outreach Services Coordinator, and Christine, a branch manager. Christine was asked to come today to represent the public service staff and to ensure we didn't oversee areas that would affect public service staff.

I learned so much today. A couple of surprises were that 24/7 uses the old QRC from the Internet Public Library. This screens are a bit cryptic (i don't think the interface has changed since I used it in 1997)--but it's fairly critical in that it helps to track questions that were not answered immediately. It offers a "process" of tracking the question (pending, claimed, unclaimed, etc). Also, I found out the virtual librarians have access to some electronic collections (such as xreferplus). This is very cool. Hopefully they will get more electronic collections for us to use.

More training tomorrow for the librarians. More then, over.