Hierarchy

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It's not always immediately clear to new users why we make the distinction between "admin" and "user" accounts on the LibraryH3lp system. The short answer is that, with regard to issues of security and patron privacy, we need to be able to answer the question of anyone: who is the boss of you?

When you create an admin account by signing up through the web interface, you're actually creating an administrative domain. You can create any number of queues, for any purposes, and any number of users. You can assign those users to queues in any fashion: for instance, someone might be both a subject expert and a general reference librarian, and should monitor multiple queues when logged in---you can do that. By creating those user accounts within the admin interface, you're explicitly defining the "boss" relationship. If everyone registered their own top-level account, we'd have to find some (more complicated) method of determining who can assign who to monitor what queues. (And who can view transcripts, etc.)

But there's more to it than that. Within an administrative domain, your users are all "friends." If you created queues for reference and circulation, the operators on those queues can transfer chats to each other. Your reference staff can transfer chats to subject experts and vice-versa. You have a lot of ways to connect the patron to the librarian best suited to help them, quickly.

But there's even more to it than that. Because aside from the boss relationship, there's really no difference between an admin account and an ordinary user account. More specifically, the users you create can in turn create their own users and queues and define their own service models. For example, if you started using LibraryH3lp in your university's main library and wanted to grow your service, you might start by creating accounts for each of your branch libraries. Then your branch libraries create their own users and define their own queues, and you don't have to manage all those details. But, because you created those accounts initially, everything they do falls under your administrative domain. Now you can transfer chats not only from reference to circulation, but you can directly connect patrons to your law library or health-sciences library. You can start thinking about staffing collaborative services with other libraries, either after-hours only or full-on collaboration, all the time.

Even in the collaborative scenario, transcripts (if you opt-in to them) are still secure. The recipient of a transfer can, of course, see the prior history of that chat. But outside of that special case, librarians can only see transcripts of the queues they're assigned to, and only the owner of a queue can delete a transcript.

And a reminder: this all applies equally to IMs. LibraryH3lp is more than just a pretty widget.

Lastly, I want to note that, if by accident of history you do have multiple top-level admin accounts that you would like to consolidate into one domain, as described above, just let us know. We can make it happen.