AskEASL Update
Committee members:
Sharon Domier, and Setsuko Noguchi (Co-chairs), Tomoko Goto, Sally Hastings, Rob Britt
Activities during the past four months:
- Corrected programming errors that had caused many of the automated messages to bounce back.
- Worked with a young Korean Studies library school student on virtual reference and introduced her to Joy Kim for mentoring.
Question Activity:
8 questions total
5 - Chinese Studies
1 - Japanese Studies
2 - Korean Studies
Comments:
Traffic is the lowest it has ever been. There are likely a number of reasons for this:
- insufficient advertising
- system is not suited to an academic environment
- alternatives now exist such as QuestionPoint
- faculty prefer to ask help directly from someone they trust
- many questions are asked through listservs
- it takes work to go to AskEASL and ask/answer questions rather than through email
- volunteers do not have time to do it justice
Suggestion
One proposal for changing it is to work on the abstracts for links and to input question and answer sets that have been modified to remove personal information and would serve as FAQ. Volunteers could provide this information based on their daily work. Most librarians have saved good question/answer sets so they don't have to redo the work later. This would help to model the kinds of questions that are appropriate and give people something to read on the site. Since personal information is removed, no one's research topic is endangered and librarians have more confidence because they have already done all the legwork.
Submitted by Sharon Domier after consultation with the Committee
