By Hannah on June 4, 2026
Libraries often lead the way with emerging technology, but mass AI adoption has brought some unique challenges. As AI chatbots take the world by storm, reference departments have noticed a huge shift in patron expectations. While we firmly believe the right answer beats the fastest answer – who says you can't have both? Recent updates in LibAnswers have focused on efficiency, allowing you to answer questions more quickly than ever!
🖼️ Copy & Paste Images into Tickets and Chat
While you've been able to copy & paste images into LibChat for a few months, we've also added support for pasting images directly into tickets! Pasted images will be added inline to the body of the ticket and display in your patron’s email client without the need to click on an attachment. 🎉 This feature makes it easier than ever to share clear step-by-step instructions – plus, with rich text editing options you can embed links into images for a seamless user experience!
Want to work even faster? No problem – you can also paste images into macros! Read all about it in our April Release Notes.
🔍 Patron ILS Lookup
Imagine being able to look up the status of a patron's hold during a chat, without even leaving the page. That's possible now with Patron ILS Lookup! You can access this popular new feature on the ticket answer page or LibChat dashboard within an active chat. This works for sites that have activated ILS Integration, allowing you to quickly check ILS data and answer questions swiftly and accurately. Check out our recorded training session for a full walk-through!
But wait, there's more! You can look up a patron in LibAnswers to view their LibAnswers ticket history and associated LibCal activity like event registrations and appointment bookings, in addition to their ILS info.
🔄 Automated Workflows
Custom workflows help you automate ticket assignment, ticket priority, and more – much faster! Maybe you want to assign tickets tagged with 'WiFi' and 'Central' to the Central Branch's IT department? Or perhaps you want to assign a high priority level to all tickets that are tagged as 'complaint' and then route them to a dedicated queue? Allow LibAnswers to take the wheel so you can identify solutions at a lightning-fast pace – leading to improved patron satisfaction. Take a deep dive in our training session about LibAnswers workflows!
🔔 Email Alerts for Tags and Keywords
Custom email alerts are one of the best ways to ensure the right messages are reaching the right people on your team, and now you can set up notifications for keywords and tags! This feature fast-tracks notifications for all kinds of scenarios – from specialized workflows for specific requests, to elevating eyes on a ticket based on a tag.
📱SMS Upgrades
Our SMS add-on is an excellent way to make communication easier for patrons – and it just got even better! Are there several questions you tend to answer over and over again? Setting up SMS macros will be a huge time-saver. Create dedicated macros that align with character limits and the plain text format to answer those FAQs with just a few clicks.
If you're a fan of time-saving hacks, you're going to love automatic keywords! For example, LibAnswers can automatically send your library's address to users who text 'location'. LibCal users can take advantage of our new Hours autoresponder! Automatically send patrons up-to-date hours from your LibCal system. You can choose to send today's hours or weekly hours, if you'd like to give patrons the rundown on the next seven days. Read more in our FAQs about automatic keywords and macros!
A Note About Privacy
Many patrons choose to engage with the library to avoid training AI or sending personal information into the ether. At Springshare, privacy is extremely important to us. We will never sell, share, or distribute patron information. LibAnswers has built-in privacy scrub tools, allowing you to securely remove any personally identifiable information from your system. If you're curious, read the privacy policy on our website.
If you'd like to stay in the loop about product updates, be sure to subscribe to our blog, read release notes in the Springshare Lounge, or keep an eye out for upcoming webinars in our Inside the Update series – you can watch the May recording now!