Chat catch-up

I've had several sessions recently, so here's my catch-up post --

• last week was one really long (1 hr) question, and I think the problem was that maybe the answer didn't exist. The patron was looking for a specific report on a government program that had been referred to (vaguely) in a senate speech. I found the report, I found the senator's remarks -- not what she wanted. I found several other things -- not what she wanted. Perhaps the senator was speculating about the changed attitudes of the Tanzanians and did not actually have documentation of this? I finally referred her to her home library, which I noticed referred her to a subject specialist.


• next session -- a couple of pretty easy questions, that I used the college websites to answer. One that I actually asked them to call their reference desk, because it sounded like a complicated case that might involved exceptions to ILL policy, etc. The home library looked to be open and available.


• I have trouble remembering to sign-in on time. Does anyone know of a timer that can be set on the computer? I'm afraid Jaclyn is going to give me a scolding!


• Now I'm on my last chat for the week. It's a pretty slow Friday afternoon, but I just made someone happy with the NCES education statistics site. They were looking for illiteracy rates by state and county, which was surprisingly easy to find with google. Then there was the question about how to get to the next level on the video game... guess they didn't know I have no clue! I'm not sure I handled this well, since I sort of told them this wasn't the kind of questions we usually handle. This was one from MD AskUsNow. Is their service Academic & Public combined?
• And I discovered a really cool trick I didn't know -- you can sort the libraries on the librarians' list alphabetically. Just hit the title of the column. I figured this out so the next time I get a MD AskUsNow question I can sort quickly and see if someone from that cooperative is online. I also noticed that it sorts first by type of library, and academics are "B"... not A as one might expect.