Schools

What is Ask a Librarian?

Ask a Librarian is a free service available to all residents of Florida and especially useful for students. We are an online chat service that provides live assistance from a librarian right when people need it. We want to complement your hard work by assisting your students late at night and on weekends. Our service is staffed with librarians from 91 partner libraries - including public, academic and special - throughout Florida, and is open 10 a.m. to midnight Sunday through Thursday and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. Email assistance is available 24/7.

How does Ask a Librarian work?

First, go to www.askalibrarian.org, choose your library and ask a question. 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, two to 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 the information you need by guiding you through the myriad of available resources. The librarian might 'co-browse' these resources with you. Co-browsing is the ability to share or co-navigate resources in a Web browser, which the librarian may do while chatting 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.

Why recommend Ask a Librarian to your students?

As you know, librarians are experts at sorting through information and finding what you need from a credible source. With over 100 million sites on the Internet, students can get bogged down in results from commercial sites like Google and often have trouble finding authoritative sites. With Ask a Librarian, students have a professional to help evaluate resources, access to great resources hidden from search engines, and access to full text journals and books. Ask a Librarian can provide access to a librarian in a student's moment of need.

For more information, please contact the Virtual Reference Manager.