LibAnswers

What do you like best?

I like the intuitiveness of LibAnswers withing the chat feature. You can set it up to insert pre-populated answers, saving both you and the patron time and is very convenient as well.

What do you dislike?

I don't like that unless you intentionally go to a separate Dashboard area, you're not alerted of when new questions are submitted that you may have missed; i.e. if you share virtual reference responsibilities sometimes questions come in between folks, on missed shifts, etc. There's no notification or alert that shows you there are new ones, so questions can have been waiting through several shifts, if someone is particularly busy, and then they are forgotten until someone remembers or claims one.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

It can be used for a lot more than reference and chat questions, so I'd recommend.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We use it daily in our library system to offer an additional reference services to students, faculty, and staff at my university.