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Information Services & Resources

Email Reference Group
Notes of Meeting
February 13, 2007

Present: R. Bower, R. Caldwell, H. Calogeridis (Chair), M. Davies, J. McTaggart (Recorder), B. Menich, J. Morgan, S. Perkins, C. Steele

1. Welcome Sara and Richard: Helena welcomed Sara Perkins and Richard Bower to the Email Reference Group.

2. Dokutek Alternatives (C. Woods):

Charles Woods was invited to the meeting to discuss what alternatives to Dokutek are available for providing the e-reference service. Could an email alias in Outlook be set up? This would be possible; however, it might not be the best solution. A program with request tracking software would be desirable. Also, it would be better to have a more integrated approach rather than having a number of different programs for the various services offered. There should be discussion with other groups – especially CROG – to make people aware. Actions: Charles will investigate further the possibilities for putting the individual softwares in a common platform. Helena will forward today’s meeting notes to Doug Morton.

3. Minutes of the last meeting, January 16, 2007:

The minutes were approved.

4. Business Arising:

Item 1, Training Issues: the sample training questions were developed and were used by Sara and Richard

Item 2, Staff website updates: all actions were done

Item 5, Dokutek maintenance:
* Doug Morton confirmed that the deletions from Dokutek are permanently deleted. Helena has not made any deletions.
* Historical email reference statistics are available from Dokutek
* Marian has not yet begun to keep a record of activity filtering into PINE
* Canned messages still need to be done

5. Staff Website Updates (Marian and Judy):

The group discussed the email reference service article that Marian distributed. There was further discussion about content for the “best practices” page.
Actions:
* Marian and Judy will continue to work on the content for the best practices page
* Rachel will construct an FAQ page. This will include the most commonly asked questions, as well as some unique questions that are often received (e.g. Seagram’s questions)

6. Training Process Feedback:

* Sara is not scheduled to do e-reference until March so she hasn’t been able to practice
* She has been self-training in the subject areas using the subject guides but would like to have some subject training
* She will convey to Helena the areas for which she would like to receive further training

7. Other:

* The properties under the “question details” do not need to be changed. The statistics will be recorded in Dokutek as number of questions or number of messages
* Richard had one question that came in through PINE. There was discussion about the security of the PINE system
* The group agreed that it is not necessary to include statistics in the disclaimer for the types of information not provided by the service.

Email Reference Group
libRefEmail@library.uwaterloo.ca
March 13, 2007