Email to the Staff asking them to work on a new question

This is an example of the email sent to the staff member. Email’s advising allocation of new questions to staff member’s arrive with the type of question, and the question number clearly indicated in the subject line of the email, for example a Local history question may arrive with the heading “PROB2459 New Local history question assigned to you”.

The email itself contains all of the information provided by the client, and includes hotlinks for the librarian to go directly to various relevant places in RefTracker to begin work on the question. So, for example, there is enough information in this email for the staff member to decide whether it should be rejected, or reallocated to another staff member, or for the staff member to start working on the question without having to seek any further information about the question from any other place.

Any question attachments that have been received before this email is delivered will appear as hyperlinks in the body of the staff email.  Using hyperlinks reduced the email traffic and mail box space required, while ensuring that staff know that attachments have been provided and can quickly reviewed them by clicking the link.  The attachments can be easily reused by right clicking the attachment name and using the “Copy link” option.  This will allow the permanent URL for this attachment to be reused anywhere that you want to reuse that attachment such as in the body of a RefTracker response, or in an email.

 Of course no staff email is sent if your system parameters say that these questions go into the unallocated questions pool, rather than being specifically allocated to an individual staff member. If your library uses the pool, at least one staff member must be monitoring the pool for new arrivals.

Other than any staff monitoring the pool or staff that need access to DeskStats all day, there is no need for reference staff to sit in RefTracker all the time, because RefTracker will notify them via an email such as this, whenever it requires them to do something new. 
For now will we continue examining the client interface. A separate manual covers what the staff member does when they receive an email such as this.