At Altarama we provide software solutions for the request answering function of information organizations. Our clients vary greatly in size, type and mission, and although they are all delivering information to their customers, each demands functionality that meets their unique needs. As a result, our clients enjoy the power, flexibility and intuitive usability of our software solutions, reflecting years of close collaboration by our world-class software development team, with this wide range of similarly motivated clients.
Here are some of the client types we serve. Our focus means we are uniquely qualified to solve unusual and demanding request management challenges, bringing together software tools and staff expertise second to none. Take a look, and let’s talk about your needs!
Research Centers
RefTracker empowers information and knowledge organizations to:
- Manage both information request services and internal assignments
- Ensure staff provide quality responses within your defined service levels
- Track and respond to Research projects, Literature search requests, Systematic reviews, New item suggestions, Document delivery requests, ILL’s, Current Awareness, Patent Watch alerts, and much more
- Manage FOI (Freedom of information) requests
- Integrate with Outlook for easy user communication.
- Produce custom, detailed statistics on the work being done
Law Firms
RefTracker allows law firms, academic law libraries and other legal institutions to:
- See all requests in one place, and filter views by person, location, practice area, type, and deadline date/time
- View who is working on each request and its current status
- Integrate with Outlook for easy user communication
- Provide custom forms and workflows for practice groups, departments, teams and individuals
- Easily track time and cost information, with auto-export to time/billing systems
Special Libraries
Whether you are a Health library, Parliamentary library, Corporate library, Government library, or even a unique information request answering service, RefTracker, RefChatter and DeskStats enable your special library to provide quality request answering services including:
- Manage both information request services and internal assignments
- Ensure staff provide quality responses within your defined service levels
- Track and respond to Research requests, Literature search requests, Systematic review, New item suggestions, Document delivery requests, ILL’s, Current Awareness, Patent Watch alerts, FOI (Freedom of information requests), and much more
- Comments and suggestions, including website comments
- Requests for training and librarian meetings.
- Integrate with Outlook for easy user communication
- Produce custom, detailed statistics on the work being done
- See all requests in one place, so your staff can work better as one team
- View who is working on each request and its current status
- Easily track time and cost information
Academic Libraries
RefTracker, RefChatter and DeskStats provide a complete suite of request management capabilities for higher education institutions who use RefTracker to facilitate:
- Ensure staff provide quality responses within you defined your defined service limits
- Track and respond to Research requests, New item suggestions, Document delivery requests, ILL’s, Current awareness, ISBN applications, FOI (Freedom of information requests), and much more
- eReserve requests
- Primo (OpenURL) requests and broken link notifications
- Requests for assistance with library applications such as running ILMS reports
- Comments and suggestions, including website and catalogue comments
- Requests for training and librarian meetings
- Integrate with Outlook for easy user communication
- Produce custom, detailed statistics on the work being done
- See all requests in one place, so your staff can work better as one team.
- View who is working on each request and its current status
- Management of the internal tasks required to support their Request Management service, and much more
National, State and Public Libraries
RefTracker, RefChatter and DeskStats provide appropriate services for the smallest to the very largest of National, State, and Community Public libraries. They use RefTracker to facilitate:
- Ensure staff provide quality responses within your defined service levels
- Track and respond to Research requests, New item suggestions, Document delivery requests, ILL’s, Current Awareness, FOI (Freedom of information requests), and much more
- Local history and community information requests
- Copy order services including copyright clearance, digitization requests and managing the digitization process
- Collection development – managing donation offers and purchase opportunities for rare or historical items.
- Comments and suggestions, including website and catalogue comments
- Requests for training and librarian meetings
- Integrate with Outlook for easy user communication
- Produce custom, detailed statistics on the work being done.
- See all requests in one place so your staff can work better as one team
- View who is working on each request and its current status
- Manage the internal tasks required to support their Request Management service, and much more
- Capture helpful statistics about your service desks operations including incident reporting
Archives
From national to local archives, RefTracker enables staff to:
- Respond to requests for assistance in using your records
- Manage requests to view items
- Track training and workshop attendance
- Handle digitization and preservation requests
- Respond to orders for copies of records or genealogical history
- Receive Comments and Suggestions
Museums & Galleries
RefTracker helps manage a wide range of services for the request services of Museums and Galleries, including:
- Research requests that come in through your library or information service
- Curatorial requests
- Requests to view specific items
- General requests such as opening hours
- Collection development – handling donation offers and purchase opportunities for rare items – prevent your staff from bidding against each other
Technical Colleges and Community Services
Because College and Community reference services are so often provided on-the-spot, tick sheets are commonly used to capture statistics. Anyone who has used them knows that paper tick sheets are time consuming and error prone. DeskStats is an easy-to-use, flexible and powerful alternative – an electronic tick sheet!
- Capture request statistics with a single click or touch – how the request arrived, where it was asked, type of request, and how long it took to answer.
- Gather additional details with a few more clicks, such as request success, requester type, useful resources, and textual comments.
- Examine statistics with just a few clicks, or have reports sent to you automatically.
- Configure DeskStats to collect the specific data you need, using your own terminology.
- Collect statistics across multiple service points and configure each for its specific services.
- Forward requests needing further research to a researcher for follow-up.
- Control your data collection and analysis without IT help, saving time and costs.