My home set-up for AskAway
Part of our co-op responsibilities was research assistance in the form of synchronous research help (AskAway) and asynchronous research help (the LibAsk research email).
AskAway is a chat reference service available online at most institutions in British Columbia and the Yukon territory. The types of questions we would encounter ranged from simple, such as current covid-19 protocols at a local institutional library, to complex, such as graduate research involving subject-specific databases.
While in the beginning I found this task stressful, especially if I was juggling more than three questions at once, I found that this experience really helped me to familiarize myself with conducting meaningful searches. I was also able to improve my search speed, navigate and understand the user experience for different institutional library websites, and get students, staff, alumni, and community members connected with the right information. It was especially rewarding when I was able to teach new skills to patrons, such as boolean search terms or which databases they would find useful in their research.
LibAsk is an email reference service in which students, staff, alumni, and community members can send in research questions. As a co-op student, I was in charge of answering any emails that came in on Tuesday of each week, and was able to work through a variety of questions on topics such as:
- SFU's covid-19 protocol
- student and staff account issues
- subject-specific research questions
- cataloguing questions
- book donations
- copyright questions
- citation management questions etc.
I was also in charge of a project to organize these emails and create an RRSDA and best practices for organizing them. You can read more about this project here.