Sign-In Information

We do not require any personal or contact information to initiate a chat session. However, the librarian might ask for your telephone number or e-mail address so that he or she can call or e-mail you in order to best work on more complex questions. The librarian might also ask whether or not you are affiliated with UNC-Chapel Hill in order to identify the most appropriate resources for answer your question; many of our databases are licensed for use only by affilates. Our chat services are open to everyone.

Answering Your Question

We often work in a collaborative fashion with our colleagues in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library System, and your question might be best answered by a librarian other than the one that originally received your chat. Your question might be forwarded to a subject specialist librarian better able to provide a good answer. Your contact information will be sent along with your question so that you can be contacted in the most timely manner.

During the Fall and Spring semesters, Sunday-Thursdays from 9pm-midnight, our chat services are staffed by librarians from Duke and NCSU in addition to the regular UNC-Chapel Hill librarians. All librarians participating in this program respect your privacy.

Stored Information

Chat transcripts are stored securely on our chat provider's servers and may also be downloaded to secure storage on the library's servers. We access these transcripts to evaluate the quality of our service as well as for statistical purposes. We are occasionally contacted by researchers in the academic community who are interested in reading our chat interactions. We consider these requests on a case-by-case basis, but in all cases, any identifying patron information is stripped away before the data is provided to the researcher. We do not provide transcripts to any other entities.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries Privacy Policy applies to chat interactions.