LibraryH3lp Blog

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If you've been in the admin interface lately, you might have noticed we have a new beta call history area. I think it's very cool. If you have more than one queue, you can look at your queues individually or all together. You can look at all the chats and IMs on your queues for a specific day or a date range; you can see things like how long it took each chat to get answered, the duration of each chat, and the operator that took a chat. You can sort by columns. You can bulk download transcripts. You can delete transcripts and entire call histories. You can save your call history to a csv file so you can play with it in Excel.

The system identifies chats that went unanswered; often these are the patron coming back to say "thanks, bye" after the operator has closed their window. But sometimes they are actual missed chats, and it's great to be able to locate these easily to identify problems with a staffing model or little tech glitches.

You can also read what those pesky IM system messages say and easily select them for deletion. Another thing Eric added in on my whim because it was fairly easy: you can hover over a guestID and see the detailed transcript rather than having to click into each one to read the transcript.

It's all terribly exciting for those of us who have to prepare statistics for reports!

If you have transcripts enabled, you'll see a link on your queue pages. You can also go directly to: https://libraryh3lp.com/calls, login with your admin account, and play with the new toy.

Enjoy!

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I've loved meeting several wonderful new library colleagues while working on LibraryH3lp. Often, it starts with a quick chat, and this was the case when I first "met" Amanda Clay Powers earlier this week. She was preparing to present a whole bunch of talks at the Mississippi Library Commission Tech Fair and also wanted to have a handout about LibraryH3lp to include in a display about new ideas from ALA. Well, creating that kind of thing had never even occurred to me, and amazingly, that same day, she put together a wonderful one-page handout for the display and generously said it was OK to make it available here.

So, I just uploaded it into the wiki in the downloads section, and here you go. Thanks, Amanda! You rock.

While I'm talking about great colleagues, I'd also like to soundly thank all of you that have mentioned LibraryH3lp to other librarians and especially those who have been patiently answering e-mails from other librarians asking about the system (Ellen!). We've always wanted to have a good community support base, and you all are fulfilling that wish in spades.

In other news, Eric's been working hard on improving the admin interface, and we hope to release the first upgrade, which offers better call history/transcript manipulation, very soon.

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We now have the ability to provide the chat widget in the language specified in the patron's web browser. However, we need your help to get the appropriate translations in place. Currently, Czech is available. A partial French localization is also in place, so if you're fluent in French, we still need more help on that one.

The translations needed are for the short phrases present in the widget. A list and the e-mail address to send them to can be found on the wiki.

HUGE thanks to those who have already provided us with our first translations!