Springshare Support Blog

The QuerySpy feature is probably the unsung hero of the LibAnswers system. It enables you to see the question/query activity in your system, i.e. what people  are typing and searching for, in real time.

Seeing the QuerySpy in action reveals its amazing benefit. Many clients tell us the QuerySpy feature itself is worth the whole price of LibAnswers. After all, knowing what questions people don’t submit and what they are searching for is just as important as the questions they do submit, because then you can have the full picture about the information your visitors want to know, and add those missing questions/answers to the knowledge base. This way, future visitors will be able to find this information and your LibAnswers knowledge base will be that much better and more targeted. This is the main point of LibAnswers - for everybody to benefit from knowing answers and information which was previously asked/searched for in LibAnswers.

Today we are announcing even more query analysis tools – the full Query Spy Statistics Reports. Under the Statistics tab select “Query Spy Statistics” to see the new reports. Now you can see the breakdown of queries by month, as well as the daily and hourly query distribution. This information tells you when your system is being used the most, in addition to knowing exactly how many queries were entered every month, and how many were successful (direct matches), unsuccessful (the information was not found), and also how many queries resulted in question submissions.

Here is the sampling of the new reports:

Monthly Breakdown of Queries

Daily Distribution of Queries

Hourly Distribution of Queries

For those of you who do not have LibAnswers yet, but want to see the new QuerySpy features in action, send us an email to demo@springshare.com and we will create an admin account for you on our live trial/demo system at http://demo.libanswers.com.

We have retooled our LibAnswers statistics pages which now include a new layout and beautiful, interactive flash-based charts. We also added a few new reports which provide even better insight into how and when your LibAnswers system is being used. Here are all the new features/reports:

1. General System Report (accessible via Admin Console -> Statistics Tab -> General System Report.)
   It shows  the breakdown of questions by the source, total number of views for all questions, and the number of queries performed. There is also the Community Ranking figure, i.e. how your system stacks up against other LibAnswers sites.
2. Query Analysis Chat (accessible via Admin Console -> Statistics Tab -> General System Report.)
   Graphical (and numeric) representation of the breakdown of queries – how many queries (and what percentage) were successful queries (people find the answer they needed) vs how many did not find the answer they were looking for.
3. Monthly Question Count(accessible via Admin Console -> Statistics Tab ->Monthly/Daily/Hourly Statistics.)
   Number of questions submitted and answered by month. Available in numerical representation and as a cool bar chart.
4. Daily/Hourly Question Distributions(accessible via Admin Console -> Statistics Tab ->Monthly/Daily/Hourly Statistics.)
   Graphical representation of the daily and hourly distribution of questions, i.e. you can  see on what days (and at which hours) do people ask most questions. Really neat and useful tool which will help with staffing scheduling decisions.

For those of you who do not have LibAnswers yet (what are you waiting for, lol?) you can see the new charts in action in our screenshot tour of the Statistics package, which is available at http://springshare.com/libanswers/statistics.html (click on the “take the screenshot tour” graphic). You will be impressed.

Last but not least, in the next few weeks we are going to unveil the first optional module for LibAnswers – Reference Analytics module. The module will enable you to keep track of *all* reference statistics in LibAnswers, i.e. not just web-based reference but also Live Reference, Telephone, Email, IM, Sms, etc. You will be able to create your own categories and fields for record keeping, and then record and keep track of any reference transaction from within LibAnswers system. Optionally, the transactions can be included into the LibAnswers knowledgebase, to be searchable by patrons. Best of all, you will be able to create all kinds of useful, beautiful, and interactive reports and charts on your reference service usage patterns,  giving you an unprecedented statistical and analytical insight into your online vs. offline reference. In short, it’s going to be awesome.

As always, thanks very much for your feedback, input, and feature suggestions. Keep it up!

Our new LibAnswers system is generating a lot of great buzz, and we believe for a good reason – it is an innovative reference 2.0 tool with a refreshing new twist on the “ask a librarian” service. Many built-in Social Features, Twitter integration, FAQ knowledge-base builder, the Query Analysis, the Auto-Suggest widget… are some of the cool features that got people excited. Let’s add another one to this list – Recommended Answers.

I’ll try to contain my excitement while explaining it, but this is really cool! Way cool.

When you log on to LibAnswers to answer a patron-submitted question (or, if you are creating a new question/answer pair in the staff mode), there is a new section on the answer page – “Recommended Answers”. Based on the current question you are answering, the system will find similar/matching previously answered questions so that you can either reuse an existing answer, or read it and then improve on it before you go ahead and answer the current question.

The exciting part is that the recommendations come not only from your own knowledge-base, but also from the Community – i.e. from any institution which uses LibAnswers. This opens up many exciting opportunities for sharing content and collaboration, and it also improves the quality of the answers in the system. Librarians sharing knowledge and collaborating – that’s in the DNA of every Springshare product, including LibAnswers.

We will continue improving this new feature and tweak the “recommendation algorithm” which will get better as more content is added to the system because there will be more questions/answers to chose from.

As always, we’re all ears when it comes to listening to your ideas and suggestions for improvements so let us know what you think.

We emailed this update to all admins today, but for those users who didn’t get the email here’s a recap:

• The betas of LibAnswers (http://demo.libanswers.com) and CampusGuides (http://demo.campusguides.com) have arrived (and they look great)! We’d love for you to check them out and give us your feedback, suggestions, and comments. You can read more information about both of these cool new products at http://www.springshare.com/libanswers and http://www.springshare.com/campusguides. Send us a quick note if you’d like to check them out and we’ll create demo accounts for you on either/both systems.
• If you are going to the Summer ALA conference in Chicago, please stop by our booth #2757 to say hello. We’ll be showcasing LibGuides/LibAnswers/CampusGuides and it would be great to see you there and thank you in person for being on board!

As always, we love to hear from our clients so if you have any questions/ideas/kudos, please let us know.

Hope to see you in the Windy City!

Happy Spring everyone – our favorite season here at Springshare!

As you know, we are constantly striving to improve LibGuides based on the feedback we receive from our community members.  In that regard, we are pleased to announce that we have upgraded LibGuides to support secure logins via HTTPS/SSL.  From now on, when you login to LibGuides you will be auto-redirected to a secure channel before being prompted for your login and password.  This will augment the security measures we already had in place within the LibGuides site and network.

We also are happy to share some exciting news we’ve been working on for a while  – two cool new products from Springshare Labs:

CampusGuides is a new product based on the LibGuides platform, which will extend the content creation and collaboration capability to any group on campus – faculty, students, staff, etc.  This will create many exciting opportunities for collaboration and creation of even more quality content in your systems.  CampusGuides will include categorizations of guides into logical groups, css customization for individual guides, password protection for guides, etc.  We plan to unveil a CampusGuides beta in early May, in order to solicit on user feedback, and then announce an official release over the summer.

LibAnswers is a new question-and-answer service built specifically for libraries.  Using LibAnswers, librarians will be able to answer questions in a public forum and point visitors to library resources that are related to the question/topic at hand.  Answers can contain document attachments and embedded videos as well as links to applicable resources within LibGuides.  Visitors will be able to comment on and improve the answers, so there will be a strong social component to the system.  By embedding LibAnswers widgets on other websites, blogs, courseware systems, etc. your users will be able to ask you questions from anywhere on the web, for a true “meet the user wherever they are” experience.  Users will be able to submit questions into LibAnswers via Twitter, as well as from their iPhones or Facebook.  In addition to being a very useful web 2.0 question-and-answer service, LibAnswers will also be a great content-discovery and outreach tool for libraries, to help you engage more people and promote library resources.  LibAnswers will be tightly integrated with LibGuides, and as such it will help drive traffic to your LibGuides site (and vice versa).  The Beta will be unveiled in early May, with the production system to follow in the summer.

We at Springshare look forward to working with you on LibGuides, CampusGuides and LibAnswers!