For years, there has been a 24/7 online chat service you can use by clicking on the chat button on the Library website. It's really popular, especially at busy times of the year, but we have always had some difficulty making sure everyone could find it easily. When we moved to our new website last summer, we had students ask why we had taken the chat service away... we really hadn't, it had just moved and on most laptops and mobile devices, the button had shrunk down and lost it's cheerful and friendly "Click here to chat to a librarian 24/7" label, which is, frankly, really helpful for anyone not sure what the button does. And what we know from experience is that people, especially young people, seem cautious about clicking on unknown buttons online. Perhaps schoolchildren are now warned from an early age of the dangers of unsolicited button clicking or perhaps students just want to get to the destination because they are managing their time by the minute. In my day (dawn of the internet era), clicking on internet links and then waiting to see if your computer caught fire as a result was how we learned, but we get it - times move on.
So, we chatted with our 'friends who code' and they have come up with a shiny new chat button that floats around in the bottom right corner of your screen on every library webpage offering you the same tried and trusted live chat with a librarian service so many of you have come to love. It's still staffed by live librarians 24/7. Your friendly local library team still answer all the chats between 9 am - 4.50 pm, Monday - Friday (we ask American university librarians to step in while we're away overnight, but we always check they have given the right advice the following morning when we are back in the office and will email you if we think anything needs to be clarified). It's a great way to get (near) instant answers any time of the day or night, every day of the year. I say near instant nowadays, because working out the right answer and typing it out still takes librarians longer than it takes AI to confidently spew out something unreliable, so if there is a little icon telling you someone at the other end is "typing", please bear with us!
tl;dr -
Our "chat with a librarian" button now radiates welcoming light and floats in the bottom right corner of every library webpage. Click on it for (near) instant answers to anything Library, 24/7 every day of the year.