Ask a Librarian provided a quality collaborative reference service for allFloridians. Ask a Librarian was provided by the Tampa Bay Library Consortium(TBLC) in partnership with the Division of Library and Information Services(DLIS).

Ask a Librarian (askalibrarian.org) is Florida’s collaborative virtual reference service. It provided live reference assistance to Florida residents at their moment of need via chat, email and text messaging. In surveys, the public calls Ask a Librarian a “tremendous help” that is “helpful and informative” and right at their fingertips.

Ask a Librarian was open for live chat and live SMS service 84 hours per week, staffed by trained participating library staff and Ask a Librarian virtual reference interns. Email reference and asynchronous SMS queries were available24/7. During the period of October 2016 through September 2017, a total of 60,833 transactions were conducted. This included 34,932 chat, 4,088 SMS and 21,813 emails.

A local desk was created for all active participants in Ask a Librarian, a total of 100.The local desk could be staffed by participating library staff with which they could answer all questions from their library's users through email, chat and SMS. If the local chat department was not being staffed, questions automatically roll over to the collaborative desks (academic desk first for academic libraries). Emails and SMS queries were answered asynchronously by the originating library.

Participating libraries implemented their use of the local desk as they saw fit to meet the needs of their users. For example, Florida State University and Seminole County Library Systems staffed their local chat departments every hour that the libraries were open. In another example, the University of South Florida, Tampa Campus, have two email queues that enable them to route questions to the appropriate staff. They used a queue for all e-resources support and inquiries from their students, faculty and staff and a general queue for other inquiries. Questions can be transferred between these queues if needed.

One of the best examples of the impact in implementing a local desk was Lee County Public Library which began staffing its desks in May, 2016, for six hours a week. By July,there was a 703% increase in chats, totaling 1,195 chats in the October to September months. The new hours of availability coupled with the addition of a slide-out chat widget had a huge impact on direct communications with their patrons, and worked to lighten the traffic coming through to the collaborative desks.

Promotion of Ask a Librarian was key to the development of the service. In 2015-16 TBLC worked with its marketing firm, Lure Design, to create a new campaign once again utilizing a superheroes theme. The superhero designs featured six designs and used recognizable superhero slogans.

The remaining 200,750 bookmarks ordered in the previous year were distributed to libraries, and TBLC reordered using the previous designs. TBLC also worked with Lure Designs to create new horizontal bookmarks from the remaining two heroes not previously featured on the promotions. A total of 100,000 bookmarks of the new design were purchased and 162,000 of the original four bookmarks were reordered.

In addition,the images were used to create Facebook, Twitter and Instagram-ready images which libraries can download and use in their social media campaigns. These, bookmarks and digital images, were made available for all Florida libraries to use to promote the service. They are located on the Ask a Librarian information website at https://info.askalibrarian.org.

As an additional medium for promotions, 1,000 posters were created from the two most popular bookmark heroes, 500 of each design. In the first week of availability, 126 posters went out to 17 libraries.

A design featuring all the heroes was created and distributed to each of the participating libraries as notepads, and we received several requests for more. Five thousand notepads were restocked as an order-ready item to be released in the new grant year.TBLC also used the group hero designs in additional online promotional offerings.

Some of the academic librarians requested material without the heroes on them, and business cards were created with the phrase “You’ll always wonder why you didn’t Ask a Librarian sooner.” A total of 15,000 were ordered.