New feature: Report Broken Link
It’s been a tough few months with COVID-19 and all that goes with it. There have been a lot of changes for universities, academics, staff and students, and their families as we all adjust to the new normal (for now). For academics and universities, supporting this shift to completely online study has meant tracking down and sharing online resources (that have been made available legally) as swiftly as possible. The focus is providing access to resources and the need for sharing information about online resources rather those that are physically available in the library. The important thing is ensuring students don’t have any issues in accessing these online resources…
New Feature Alert!
There’s an exciting new feature ready to enable on your reading lists that allows your students to report issues with accessing online resources – we have called this feature ‘Report broken link’. You might be thinking: “hang on a second, you said “issues with accessing online resources”… but it’s called “Report broken link”?? Is ISO-life getting to you guys?” Good pick up, we did say it was about access. To students, it doesn’t matter what’s actually happening – if you’ve hit the concurrent user limit, if the resource needs you to be on the university’s VPN, or if it’s actually a broken link – to them, the important thing is that they can’t access the resource, the link isn’t working for them and it’s broken.
Publishers have granted temporary access to some of their resources, which is helping to alleviate some of the stress for now, which is awesome, and many of these bookmark well, but what happens when the item that’s created isn’t … well… complete? Perhaps it’s captured basic metadata and a sessional URL which will work for you for now but is not stable or permanent. Although the little cataloguer from my past is not happy about bookmarks with ‘bad’ metadata, the important thing here is the URL or web address. As you’ve read the Report broken link feature is useful now for fixing these incorrect links, but there’s a future benefit here too – after the temporary access to these resources has been revoked if you miss some in your clean up. The reports could be used to make purchasing decisions or added to a wishlist. The uses for this feature are endless, no?
Report broken link in detail
This report broken link functionality lets your students give feedback on links while they are interacting with the list. The process doesn’t require them to copy anything at all or open their email, they just need to do a few clicks on the reading list itself. Against each item is an action button that offers several options including ‘Report broken link’. Clicking the ‘Report broken link’ option opens an online form that automatically captures the information of the item and its reading list ready for your student to review and submit. Before submitting the form they are also offered the ability to add details and context of what they are reporting, or just their email address so they can be kept informed.
Once this form is submitted it is sent as an email to email address(es) (mailing group, or several single email addresses) that you have specified to us when you requested this feature to be enabled. As we said, these reports will cover more than just an incorrect link, so it’s important to think about who is receiving these – who is going to do the initial review and diagnosis of the issue and who is in the best place to be as responsive as possible to these. These reports need to be picked up and actioned as quickly as possible, especially in the current climate, so it might be that your online library help desk is the first port of call. They can then forward reports on to other teams depending on the issue.
Want to know more?
For more information and to see Report broken link in action, check out our support article.
If this is of interest to you please let us know by raising a support ticket.
