Status Line

• Reference Services
• October 2006
• Issue: 206

Local Knowledge Base Ready for Patron Searching

Libraries or groups can now offer their local Knowledge Base for patron searches! On the wish lists of many QuestionPoint members for a long time, public access to your question and answer pairs is now a reality. Your administrator must set an indicator in the QuestionPoint Administration module and write an ownership statement, if wanted, to appear on each record. See the Instructions at http://www.questionpoint.org/support/documentation/templates/search_globalkb.html on how to set up the permissions and add the link or search box to your library's web site. The setup takes just a few minutes and the results are immediate!

You can control which knowledge base records are searchable by your patrons. Only records you have marked as Public in your Knowledge Base are searchable by this method. All records, Public or Private, are available to your librarians when working within QuestionPoint.

How could this be useful to you?

Use the QuestionPoint Local Knowledge Base to create an FAQ about your library, to store often asked and answered questions about specific student assignments, for instructions for various library-related resources and services, for local information that you get asked about frequently.

Send your own ideas as how you might use this in your library to nealej@nylink.org. As always, please contact us if you have any questions about this new feature.