September 9, 2024

Hi Folks, 

See below for a message from Gesse Stark-Smith, the new Virtual Reference Coordinator for Oregon’s 24/7 library chat reference service, Answerland. Please direct any questions to Gesse. 

Cheers!

Buzzy Nielsen
Program Manager for Library Support and Tribal Liaison
State Library of Oregon 

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Hi All, 

My name is Gesse, and I am the new Virtual Reference Coordinator with the State Library. I work to support Answerland, the chat and email reference service for people who live, work or study in Oregon. Answerland is staffed by library staff from across Oregon and library school volunteers, with 24x7 back-up from librarians all over the world. 

I’m writing to you today to introduce myself and to share best practices for using Answerland in a K-12 setting. We love having students ask us questions, and we want to make sure they have a good experience working with us. Answerland is not set up to handle a full class logging on to chat at one time. We can generally handle two to three students asking us questions at once. That’s because at any one time, there are only one to three librarians staffing the service. Often, it can take 20 minutes or more for librarians to provide a complete answer to a question.

If you want to demonstrate to students how to use the service, we recommend that you determine as a class the question you want to ask, and while projecting the Answerland chat box, have one student engage with the Answerland librarian while the others watch. That way you can also coach appropriate responses. Then as students hit roadblocks in their research, they can individually use Answerland as the need arises. We will work with them to find and vet relevant sources, but we cannot do assignments for them or return immediate answers.

Additionally, we ask that staff remind students that they are chatting with real people. This is NOT an Artificial Intelligence based service. Manners are appreciated, and most often, inappropriate behavior can be traced. 

For more details on how schools can use this service, see the Schools section of the Answerland website or feel free to get in touch with me directly. 

Hope the school year is off to a good start for you all! Thanks for all you do to support students!

Best,

Gesse Stark-Smith
Answerland Coordinator
State Library of Oregon