Shared Systems within LibAnswers

Sharing your LibAnswers system with TBLC's Ask a Librarian system enables your staff to answer statewide questions without logging out of your local LibAnswers system. This connection also extends to chat widgets, allowing you to link the collaborative desk as a fallback within your own system's widget options.

Kelly Doty
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10 steps

Libanswers

To start the process, TBLC will send a request to Springshare to make a connect between the two LibAnswers systems

No TBLC LibAnswers sign is needed when the systems are shared. You'll log in to your local LibAnswers dashboard to monitor and answer TBLC Ask a Librarian questions.

Please be sure to bookmark the toolbox site for additional resources related to the collaborative service, as you'll not see reminders and announcements posted to the TBLC AAL dashboard: <https://toolbox.askalibrarian.org/>

TBLC then enables sharing for statewide and academic queues (as applicable). The icon's green color indicates the connection is established.

Note: Once the connection has been completed, your users will have the ability to answer and transfer questions that originate from the TBLC LibAnswers system.

You will then add your users to the Statewide and Academic shared queues within your LibAnswers Queue Settings, located at the bottom of the queue list.

This step can be repeated within the department settings under LibChat Setup as well.

Departments can also be set up to automatically allow department access with users who already have queue access, making the addition of new users a less cumbersome process.

Once sharing options from both platforms are enabled, you will see the option to add the collaborative desk(s) as a fallback department.

Click "Edit" to change "Who monitors the widget"

Click "Add another fallback"

We recommend adding Academic as your second fallback and Statewide as your third fallback option if applicable.

Shared tickets will show as a separate tab on the ticket dashboard.

Springshare also offers some suggestions for Shared System setup under their FAQs <https://ask.springshare.com/libanswers/faq/1556>

**Please note:** Your system will always show a connection even during AAL holiday closures. Please be sure to keep an eye on when the hours of operation will change for those dates: <https://toolbox.askalibrarian.org/holiday-closures/>

**Please note:** IP address banning does not transfer between systems.