FAQ
Ask a Librarian is a free online service that allows Floridians to chat live with a librarian for immediate assistance. A trained information professional can guide you to the answers you need in minutes rather than your wasting hours navigating hundreds of unhelpful and irrelevant web sites. More than 100 libraries statewide collaborate to provide this service to their patrons and the patrons of other participating libraries.Ask a Librarian is a joint project of the College Center for Library Automation and the Tampa Bay Library Consortium. Ask a Librarian is funded as part of the Florida Electronic Library by a Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) grant.
Ask a Librarian’s email service is optimized for your handheld device. Visit our mobile interface at www.askalibrarian.mobi, then choose your local library from the list. E-mail your question anytime, and a librarian from your library will answer you via e-mail. We are working on adding more features, including a live chat service.
When you click on the chat button, your question enters a queue for the on-duty librarians. Librarians answer questions in the order they receive them. Typically, depending on the expected traffic, between two and six librarians staff the Ask a Librarian desk during the hours we are available for live chat.
When the librarian accepts your question, you are able to chat one-on-one with that librarian while he or she helps you find what you need by guiding you through the myriad of resources available. The librarian might screen-share these resources with you. Screen-sharing allows the librarian to co-navigate resources on your PC.
If the librarian cannot answer your question during the session, he or she may suggest other sources for you to try that cannot be accessed in the online environment or ask for your contact information so he or she or your local library may follow up with you.
Once the session ends, you will be given the option to view and print your transcript or e-mail the session to yourself for later use. The transcript will provide links to all of the resources you visited during the session.
Click here to watch a live demo
We are available via live chat 10 a.m. to midnight Sunday through Thursday and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday Eastern Time, excepting holidays. E-mail assistance is available 24/7 except during scheduled maintenance.
Yes. When you use Ask a Librarian, a real Florida librarian is assisting you.
We typically have two to six librarians monitoring questions during the hours that we are open for live chat.
It should only take a few minutes for a librarian to say hello after you send your question, although your wait time could increase if we receive an unusually high number of questions. We answer questions in the order we receive them. Please be patient, and we will get to your question as soon as possible. The length of your conversation with the librarian will depend on the complexity of your question and how detailed of an answer you would like. An average chat session lasts 10 to 20 minutes.
Ask a Librarian has a policy of mutual respect. Our librarians will treat you with courtesy and respect and we expect the same respect in return from you. There are several types of behavior that are unacceptable and may cause you to lose the privilege to ask questions again in the future. Deliberately wasting the librarian's time or using language that is offensive, obscene or harassing will not be tolerated. To read more about our behavior policy click here.
Probably not. Because Ask a Librarian is a statewide service, you could be speaking with a librarian from any of our 100 participating libraries. If the librarian is not from your local library, he or she will not have access to your personal library record.
Probably not. Because Ask a Librarian is a statewide service, you could be speaking with a librarian from any of our 100 participating libraries. If the librarian is not from your local library, he or she will not have access to your personal library record.
Librarians are experts at sorting through information and finding what you need from a credible source. With over 100 million sites on the Internet, searching on Google and Yahoo can return millions of Web sites filled with information that's not quite what you were looking for. And often, those sites have questionable authority. With Ask a Librarian, you have a professional to help evaluate resources, access to great resources hidden from search engines, and access to full text journals and books. Studies prove that having a librarian assist you with your research can help you get better grades and save you time. Librarians will not only help you find information but will also help organize and evaluate that information. With so much information available, it's important to sort out fact from fiction, and librarians can help. Ask a Librarian brings this valuable resource straight to you when and where you need it.
It's not necessary. When your chat session is over, you will have the option of viewing or saving your transcript session, which will include all of the Web site addresses your librarian suggested.
Your Ask a Librarian session, like all web-based applications, responds more quickly if you have a broadband connection. You will also need Java (1.5 or above) to handle the more advanced screen-sharing application.
