Live Help FAQ

• What is Live Help?
• Who can use this service?
• What questions are best suited for Live Help?
• Who answers the questions?
• How is my privacy or anonymity protected?
• Is any special software required to use Live Help?

Live Help is a reference service provided by Jesuit colleges and universities throughout the country that enables patrons to ask questions about research, library resources, and library policies through a realtime instant messenging service. Following a chat session, patrons can receive a transcript of their online discussion in their e-mail.

The service is available to current students, faculty, and staff of the participating Jesuit institutions without restrictions. When a non-affiliated patron accesses the service, the librarian may do a brief reference interview and point the patron to freely available web based resources, or may refer the patron to a local public institution if the question does not pertain to Georgetown's unique collections or resources.

• Help searching the library catalog.
• Assistance selecting and searching appropriate databases.
• Information about the library and its services.
• Help accessing library resources when you are off campus.
• Internet search strategies.

Patrons may be referred to other resources if chat is not the most appropriate medium for answering their question.

Librarians from Georgetown's Lauinger Library answer questions Monday through Friday, generally during the day and early evening hours. Librarians from other Jesuit colleges and universities or contract librarians provided through a division of Tutor.com will answer questions received outside Georgetown reference staff's online service hours. If you would like assistance from a Georgetown librarian outside of Georgetown's Live Help service hours, please stop in, call, or send us an email.

Chat transcripts are available to the individual librarian who helped the patron for 90 days and to the Georgetown LiveHelp administrators for 2 years. The form patrons fill out to initiate a chat requests the patron's name and e-mail, but patrons are not required to provide that information. Transcripts of chats are purged of any identifying information before being used for training purposes.

Live Help works with Firefox, Internet Explorer (version 6 SP1 or higher) and Netscape Navigator (version 8.0 or higher). It does not work with Mozilla. If you use American Online (AOL), we recommend that after connecting, you use Internet Explorer, Netscape or Firefox instead of the AOL browser.