Schools

Ask a Librarian is a free service available to all residents of Florida, and especially useful for students, through the Florida Electronic Library. We are an online chat service that provides live assistance from a librarian right when people need it.

We have lots of great free marketing items that we’re happy to send your way at no cost.

As fellow librarians, we want to complement your hard work by assisting your students late at night and on weekends. Our service is staffed with librarians from 106 partner libraries – including public, school district, 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.

Submit a question though www.askalibrarian.org or your local participating library’s website, and an on-duty librarian will respond as quickly as possible. Typically, two to six librarians staff the Ask a Librarian desk during the hours we are available for live chat.

The librarian chats online with you for as long as necessary to help you get the information you need by guiding you through the myriad of available resources. 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.

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 and access to great resources hidden from search engines, full text journals and books. Ask a Librarian provides access to a librarian in a student’s moment of need.