The report broken link functionality is a feature you can enable for students when viewing your lists. Students must be logged into your IDP to access the feature, as this helps prevent unwanted spam.
Reporting a broken link on a resource list
To report the broken link or error, click the item's action button and select 'Report broken link'.
This will open a modal over the top of your page so you don't lose where you are up to on the list. The modal encourages the user to leave details of the problem they've encountered. By default we will capture the email address of the user reporting the issue, although they may choose to send it anonymously if they wish.
What happens once this is submitted?
Clicking "Report" then emails the broken link message to the mailing address(es) that your university has selected. The email contains details and a link to the resource list item, the list it appears on, and the additional information and contact details (if included). Here is an example:
Enabling for your institution
To enable, please raise a support ticket - remember to include the email address(es) you'd like these reports to be sent to. We recommend adding a centralized mailing address for library support (eg. LibAnswers, resource lists team address, etc. ) to ensure the reports are seen and actioned. The recipient addresses for these reports can be updated at any time via a support ticket.
FAQ's
Question: Can we force reporters to use their University preferred email communication?
Answer: To use Report Broken Link, and prevent spam, all reporters will need to at least be signed in to your IDP. Due to customer feedback some years ago we changed the behavior so that for certain tasks such as to 'View Digitizations' students had to login but we relaxed the need for a profile, as this was seen as a barrier. This means we have students without profiles. So there are three categories of users we aimed to cater for.
- The first users are with or without profiles, who may wish to report that a link is broken but don't want a follow-up, the passive reporter, I had an issue but I moved on.
- The second user type is wanting a response but has not set up a profile and doesn't wish to do so, they can manually add an email address for this onetime task.
- The third user has a profile or the University is using automatic profile creation, they wish to be notified and may have further detail; in this case, in the email which the library recieves, their email address is auto-completed from their profile and they are unlikely to change this detail.
If you want to ensure users are registering their university emails then please consider automatic profile creation.