Library Answers: Los Rios Common Questions

We have created a FAQ group, Los Rios Library System Alerts (LRSA), for this purpose. Currently the Electronic Resource Librarians have the ability to create FAQs in this group.

Note that LibAnswers contains a System Status Management feature, but we found this strategy to be less flexible than a FAQ group.

Conventions

When creating FAQs in this group, do not pose the title as a question. Below these will be referred to as posts, not faqs.

When an issue that is the subject of a post is resolved, the post should be unpublished. In most cases the post should be deleted. If we think it might be convenient to reuse the post, such as Primo scheduled maintenance, we can leave it unpublished.

Topics and their implications

Some topics in this group, e.g. scheduled-maintenance and known-issues, are descriptive and can be used as needed. A couple topics have special implications.

• When you add general-alert or urgent-alert to a post, it will show up in a content box in each college's Databases A-Z page. If the post is long, it will be truncated with a link to the full post.
• When you add urgent-alert to a post, it will appear as a banner in OneSearch.
• Any published posts, regardless of topics, will appear on the LibAnswers admin dashboard page, along with links to the LOLchat calendar and so on.

Note the topics and their uses may evolve as we use this group more.

Caching

The content gets to OneSearch and the Databases page by polling Springshare's View FAQs API. Since these pages are loaded frequently, we are caching the results so as not to make excessive API calls. So when you make a new post, it can take up to 15 minutes to appear in these places, and if you remove or unpublish a post, it can take up to 15 minutes to stop appearing.

Coding

A PHP file, which we also use for displaying LibAnswers faq content on our OneSearch home pages, retrieves the API response, removes certain unneeded properties, and caches it to our server. This file is maintained in the private LSP-related Tools and Resources GitHub repository.

For the databases pages content boxes, we use a shared JavaScript file on the library web server that is maintained in our private LibGuides GitHub repository. The JavaScript retrieves the cached and compressed API response, and if it finds entries, transforms it into HTML and unhides the content box, which is by default hidden via CSS.

For OneSearch, we are using a modified version of a previously developed AngularJS component, lrTopAnnouncement, that also allows us to set up custom banners. The component retrieves the cached API response, and if it finds an entry, enters it into the component template. Note that if a custom announcement already exists, it will be pre-empted by this one.

For the LibAnswers Admin box, we are using an ordinary LibAnswers widget.