68% of respondents said that they were extremely satisfied with their Ask-a-Librarian service. 97% of respondents reported that they were either Extremely Satisfied, Very Satisfied or Satisfied with the service.
The respondent who was not satisfied with the service tried to use it three times and received no responses from a librarian. Another student responded that they were satisfied with the service even though they did not receive a response in the time they needed for their assignment. This student specifically stated how apologetic the librarian was in not getting back to the student in time.
An overwhelming majority of respondents said that they would use the service again. The only person who said no was the student who unsuccessfully tried to contact a librarian three times. This student stated that they cannot wait even 20 minutes when doing research and need answers right away.
Most respondents praised how timely of a response they received from a librarian and this directly affected whether they would use the service again. In addition to how timely the responses were, they also helped the patrons which was another factor in why they would use this service again. Patrons also mentioned how convenient the service is, which factored into if they would use the service again in the future. The respondents did not elaborate on what they found convenient about the service.
Only one respondent, who was mentioned earlier, was not satisfied with the response time to their question. Some respondents weren’t responding directly to the question, but to Interlibrary Loan times. One respondent did mention that they needed more help via chat service on the weekends.
Respondents mostly valued a fast response time, convenience, answered questions and librarian availability when evaluating this service.
Most respondents had used this service more than once before. It is unclear from the data and patron responses if they’ve used chat service more than once or if they’ve used the Ask-a-Librarian service more than once. Several responses seemed as if patrons were evaluating research services or chat services as a whole instead of the Ask-a-Librarian service that this survey was intended to assess.
There were a few suggestions that respondents gave that could be helpful to librarians and several responses provided insight as to why online research services are important to Zahnow Library patrons.