Did you know?

AskAway launched in 2006
All BC ELN member colleges, universities, and technical institutions can participate in the service
AskAway is staffed by a community of over 300 librarians and library technicians
The service is open 7 days a week
Over 430,000 students, instructors, and researchers in B.C. and the Yukon can connect to AskAway via their library

AskAway is an opt-in, collaborative chat reference service. Let's break that down. As with all BC ELN services, member libraries can choose to participate in AskAway, and those that do work together to fund and staff the service, develop policies and best practices, and govern AskAway. Through this collaboration, students across B.C. and the Yukon have equitable access to live, online chat research help.

Benefits of collaboration

Cost and time savings
- When more than one library wants to provide the same service to students, such as chat reference, they save time and money by combining efforts. For example, if a library wants to provide a chat reference service independently, they may be able to offer 35 hours/week of service.¹ By comparison, when they participate in AskAway, they can offer 73 hours/week of service as shifts are shared among all participants. Some libraries may not be able to provide consistent chat reference without AskAway and others, like in the example, can offer many more hours than they could alone.
Equity across the system
- Collaboration creates equity across the system, as libraries of all types can offer students the same hours of service with AskAway while contributing a sustainable level of staffing. Students can access research help if they're at home, working at a distance, overseas, and on evenings and weekends when the library may be closed.
Shared expertise and community building
- In addition to savings and equitable service, collaboration generates benefits such as community-building and shared expertise, which can feed back into an individual institution. For example, when AskAway develops new best practices, employees at all participating institutions contribute their ideas. Libraries may then adapt these best practices for their own use in-house.

1. This estimation was provided by a medium-sized AskAway institution.

Go back in time

AskAway was launched in 2006 and was recognized as innovative from the very beginning. In 2016, AskAway celebrated its 10th anniversary. The 2016 Actions & Achievements report reflects on AskAway's early development and official launch.

Let's see who uses AskAway and how they benefit...