Midnight Librarian: Facilitating Online Learning and Research from PST to CET

Poster presented at New Directions for Libraries, Scholars, and Partnerships: an International Symposium hosted by the Center for Research Libraries. Frankfurt, Germany, October 2017. <br>The University of Washington Libraries provides 24/7 online research support via OCLC’s QuestionPoint. Since 2015, I have worked remotely from Berlin, answering chat questions from students and faculty, on tracking down tricky citations, evaluating source credibility, exploring research topics, and troubleshooting digital access. Providing this service to patrons across multiple time zones and during higher “late night” traffic hours allows us to improve responsiveness and detect technical issues with online resources. I’ll highlight our recent Chat Transcript Analysis project, in which we performed content analysis on over 3,000 user transcripts, identifying optimal service models and areas for improvement.<br><br><br>