NCknows Public Chats (2008-2009)
These two charts detail the volume of chat traffic for the last two years by month. Traffic in 2009, with 10,264 questions, edged out 2008’s traffic, with 9419 questions. The increase in questions, however, was not a consistent climb during the entire year. Academics did rise slowly and consistently above their 2008 performance. All but two months outperformed last year (and one of those months was two chats away from a tie). Publics, however, had a more erratic year. They started off in the spring semester with less traffic than in 2008. In the fall, this trend reversed sharply. The traffic statistics on a library by library basis show that the largest shift occurred with the default queue for the NCknows.org page. Looking at the URLs where patrons found that link, almost half were from NClive.org pages (58% in December, 54% in Nov). Although NC LIVE has begun to feature NCknows more prominently on their pages in the last two months, this was not the case during the busy September and October months. Right before the fall semester, an online meeting encouraging marketing was held, which may have helped increase traffic. Also, student familiarity with this service in general may be increased. It would be instructive to see if these trends happened nationally as well.
What does all this mean? I suspect that traffic will continue to remain at this level and perhaps climb further due to NC LIVE’s 2010 redesign which features NCknows more prominently. The other variable affecting traffic is the use of “widgets” by NCknows libraries. Widgets are webchat applications (see http://libraryh3lp.com/docs/what-do-you-mean-by-widget.html) that we currently offer through Libraryh3lp. Patrons helped through Libraryh3lp widgets are currently not funneled into the normal “NCknows” queues and are therefore not answered by the NCknows librarians. If a library offers a widget, this should theoretically lead to less questions answered through their NCknows link. However, in the two libraries who piloted Libraryh3lp this year, this was not the case. PLCMC, which did offer the widget (and answered 3952 questions through it in 2009) also narrowly beat out their 2008 Questionpoint traffic (1091 questions in 2009 compared to 1076 in 2008.) And UNC Wilmington, who answered 1998 questions through their Libraryh3lp widget, beat out their 2008 Questionpoint traffic handily (207 to 130).
As the experiment with UNCW and PLCMC demonstrates, although Questionpoint traffic increased slightly in 2009, the real potential for helping as many patrons as possible is with widget-based software, like Libraryh3lp. The success of widgets we saw in NC has been duplicated in many other states and libraries. If NC shifted to Libraryh3lp in 2010, we would hope to at least double the number of patrons we could help. Of course this has lots of "side-effects" and could affect aspects of the service such as our hours and the level of participant library involvement.
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