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Information Services & Resources

Email Reference Group
Notes of Meeting
June 13, 2006

Present: Rachel Caldwell, Helena Calogeridis (facilitator), Marian Davies, Judy McTaggart, Barbara Menich, Jon Morgan, Carol Steele (recorder).
Regrets: Amy Townsend, Marina Wan.

1. Notes of last meeting -- accepted as written.

2. Business arising from the notes of April 25, 2006—none.

3. Other business arising—none.

4. Spam filter settings.
Rachel described how she had received 2 identical questions from the same person, the 2nd one after she had already replied to the first one. She then conducted a chat session with the same person who was asking the same question yet again. She asked the patron to check his spam folder; he did so and found both of Rachel’s replies to his email question.
The group agreed that, immediately following “Replies will be sent within one business day, excluding weekends and University holidays”, the following caveat should be added to the email reference form: Please check your spam folder if you have not received a reply.
ACTION: Marian will ask Marina to add this statement.

5. Monitoring PINE.
The group discussed the asklib account in PINE and agreed upon the following guidelines:
* Pine needs to be monitored on a regular basis, preferably daily.
* Each person will clear out the inbox during their assigned week.
* A reply may not be necessary if the “question” looks like spam; we should use our own discretion & add an internal note in Docutek indicating that the question has not been answered.
With input from the group, Marian cleaned up the inbox during the meeting, deleting unnecessary messages. It was agreed that we won’t keep “thank you” messages.
ACTION: Marian will conduct a PINE refresher for Barbara and Helena.

6. Patrons using “reply” instead of clicking link.
The group agreed that some users who want to ask a follow-up question/send a thank you will likely continue to use “reply” instead of clicking the link in the answer that we have sent them. It was also acknowledged that some Email Reference members will continue to use Outlook to send replies while others will work in Docutek. Whether using Docutek or Docutek/Outlook, it will be necessary to check PINE.

7. Email Reference Web Site:
The group discussed possible changes to the site; some changes were made during the meeting, as detailed below.

This site has never been included in the Groups listing, making it difficult to find.
ACTION: Marian will ask Esther to add “Email Reference” to Groups.

ACTION: Helena will write a preamble to the Comparison Table.
ACTION: Marian will add the revised Comparison Table and the Function Ratings table to the “Documents” section.

The Proposed Task table was updated during the meeting with the following item:
Accessibility—test with JAWS screen reader.
ACTION: Rachel will contact Janet to discuss possible testing.

Docutek login has been moved to the right menu. Staff can also get to the login from Ask a Librarian by going to the email reference form and clicking “admin login”.

We are missing minutes from May 2005 and Feb. 23, 2006.
ACTION: Everyone will try to locate missing minutes.

Carol is currently sending email reference statistics to Connie each month.
ACTION: Helena will ask Marina to send Connie both email & chat statistics.

Training Procedures and Using Docutek are now included under Procedures—Service & Software respectively.
ACTION: Helena will review the Procedures—Service page.

Currently we lack terms of reference.
ACTION: Helena will work on a preliminary version for the group to discuss.

The group discussed our impressions of how Docutek is working at this point in time. It was pointed out that Docutek is not email. Barbara then suggested that we may be giving users a mixed message: the service is called “email reference”; however, patrons are informed that they should not click “reply” (an email action) to ask a follow-up question. The group agreed that a number of disclaimers need to be added to the top of the email reference form, e.g. “don’t hit reply”, “double check email addresses”.
ACTION: Marian will add the creation of disclaimers to the task list.
Meeting adjourned at 11:50.

Email Reference Group
libRefEmail@library.uwaterloo.ca
March 17, 2010