Florida Launches Ask-A-Librarian Service

The state of Florida has launched a virtual reference service called Ask a Librarian ( http://www.askalibrarian.org/ ). It is apparently available for anyone, though a representative tells me "While anyone with a legitimate question can ask a question this service's primarily audience is Florida residents."

I was not able to get this site to work in Opera; looks like it's IE only. A librarian is available to answer your questions from 10am to 10pm, Monday through Friday. Once you've connected, you'll have to wait a few moments for a librarian (when I contacted them to ask about who could use the service, the wait was only a few minutes) who then answers your questions via a chat window and a co-browsing tool.

The nice thing about this site is that there's a database of already-answered questions. I searched this database for "Florida" and got one result, a well-annotated pointer to a directory of Florida's public libraries.

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