Access 2009

Skim our notes from Access 2009! Peruse the session details! Spy the live LEGO video stream! Twit the twitter stream!

LibraryH3lp’s webchat client

I started playing around with the LibraryH3lp webchat client about a month ago. It’s been around for a while, but with with the announcement of recent webchat client enhancements, I thought it was time to give it a shot.

Pros:

Similar to Meebo, the webchat client doesn’t require an install, as does Pidgin. This is nice. It saves you or your staff a bit of work. Installing Pidgin and the LibraryH3lp plugin for Pidgin and configuring Pidgin isn’t rocket science, but the web client makes all of that completely unnecessary.

The real clincher for me is in how patron transfers, file transfers, and email transcripts are handled. With Pidgin, the librarian has to click on a LibraryH3lp “for transfers…” link at the top of his chat history, then login to a LibraryH3lp web site, then transfer the patron. Logging in requires that a librarian remember/retrieve his password(s), differentiate between his password for one account (say, his library’s chat account) and his password for another account (say, his subject guide chat account). We have our ‘Pidgins’ set up such that passwords are memorized, and as such librarians tend to forget their passwords.

With the web client on the other hand, the librarian is already logged-in. There’s no need for an inconveniently-timed login and scramble-for-password at the moment of transfer.

Via the web client, librarians can easily reset their passwords to something that they will remember. This can be a huge selling point with staff. Granted, this can also be accomplished through the back-end of LibraryH3lp and in Pidgin, but it’s a lot clunkier and may require that your local LibraryH3lp administrator/password hoarder be present.

There’s also the added perk, with the webchat client, that you can see the patron’s IP and referring URL. The latter is especially quite handy if, like me, you have your chatbox scattered across a multitude of pages (e.g., subject guides for Electrical & Computer Engineering, Planetary Science, Earth Sciences, Physics, Astronomy) and would like some framework for inbound questions.

Con:

Visual alerts (of inbound chats) in the webchat client aren’t all that obvious. It’s easy to bury the tab where the webchat client is active.

However:

LibraryH3lp developers have been made aware of the issue and, in my experience, are very good about responding to feedback.

Work-around: have your webchat client opened in a separate instance of your browser, where the webchat client is the only tab active. If you’re monitoring more than one account, open a separate browser instance (not just a separate tab) for each.

I should also point out that the audio cue is incredibly effective, so if you’re in a spot where you don’t have to have your speakers turned-off, YOU WILL KNOW when you’re being chatted to. At one point the cue sounded like a cowbell. Now it sounds like SONAR. Both work great for me.

LibraryH3lp + Drupal

UWO’s library website moved over to Drupal in September 2008. Since then I’ve been working off-and-on at getting a LibraryH3lp chat box on my subject (aka Browse by Program) pages. Other librarians have expressed an interest in doing the same for their subject pages.

Here in the Allyn & Betty Taylor Library we provide chat reference service via LibraryH3lp + Pidgin, and have placed a LibraryH3lp chat box on Taylor’s Research Help page. In my realm of experience, having an open chat box (as we have on Taylor’s Research Help page) does wonders to increase chat reference stats. One drawback to the ‘embedded’ chat box approach is that patrons — should patron chose to navigate away from the ‘host’ page — patrons must click the “Pop-Out” button on the LibraryH3lp chat box in order to avoid losing the conversation. (At my last job there was a similar issue with MeeboMe. I’m sure there are work-arounds, but those are for MeeboMe enthusiasts’ consideration.)

Some of our librarians would like to include links to pop-out LibraryH3lp chat boxes on their subject (aka Browse by Program) pages as well. Real estate on these pages is limited, so here we’ve opted to run with ’status indicator’ buttons instead of open chat boxes. Having a button or link in place is (IMHO) an okay compromise, because a pop-out chat box remains available to the patron even if he or she choses to leave the page that spawned said chat box.

Anyroad, if you look at any one of my many subject pages you’ll see a “Chat Available” or a “Chat Unavailable” button. If I’m available, click the button and Bob’s yer uncle.

LibX UWO live

Yup, it’s finally up. I had a lot of fun with our graphics person when it came to the posters. I think publicity (which is more than just posters, to be sure) is the make-or-break point when it comes to users adopting LibX. I wanted it to grab folks’ curiosity with the posters and ‘collector cards’ in particular. Here they are in super-low resolution:

I had a cold at the time. Next time I’ll use LibX, or go straight to oregano oil.

This is what came of my movie poster idea. Kind of looks like UWO campus.

You can’t make it out here, but each of these ‘postcards’ has an image representing a major library on campus.

These are 4 individual letter cards with LibX info on the back

LibX: measuring use and marketing usefulness

Here’s my PPT show from Scholars Portal Day 2008, sans any copyright-infringing pics of Bruce Lee, etc. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

LibX marketing ideas

I’ll be presenting a quick song & dance about LibX (along with Tim Knight at York U and Sally Wilson at Ryerson) in Toronto at Scholars Portal Day on Friday, December 12th. My current area of interest (an quite possibly the topic of my presentation) will be about LibX assessment, and so my 5 min of fame will probably focus on this.

But what I’ve really been having a lot of fun with over the past few days is coming up with marketing ideas for LibX. There are the standard ideas, like linking it from the library homepage, having a library ‘news’ item, mounting it on public workstations, etc.But I see marketing as a real excuse to be silly.  Here are a couple of ideas that probably need some tinkering as they step on some serious copyright.

LibX movie/MMO poster:

This poster was created using BigHugeLabs/Flickr/Poster maker. It’s a a spin off the Dutch film BenX. That’s my Lineage II dwarf character Hamsun, following our successful siege and pwnage of Aden Castle. (Note: URL does not exist.)

LibX in Empire Strikes Back stickers:

For those of you who are already offering LibX to your patrons, how did you go about marketing this wonderful little device?

SL @ SLIS

FYI The University of Western Ontario’s Faculty of Information & Media Studies‘ Master of Library and Information Science program will, this Fall, be offering an elective course on Second Life and Other Virtual Worlds: Critical Perspectives and Applications.

Wondering how much of presence Second Life has gained in the SLIS world, I happened upon Richard Urban’s asis&t Bulletin article. It’s a year old, so many of you may already have read it.

Lively at LibrariDan’s Dead

13 days after my previous post on Google’s Lively, I can say that I’ve all but forgotten the application and am logging in exactly zero time per day. The main flaw with Lively (in my mind) is that there’s no alert when someone else arrives in or chats in one’s room. Loading Lively also isn’t quite nearly as straightforward as starting up Pidgin or Meebo. And I would only be using Lively for chat purposes. I’m inclined to give Lively a pass.

Wordle

Thanks to Amanda Etches-Johnson at blogwithoutalibrary.net and Meredith Farkas at Information Wants To Be Free for their posts on Wordle. Wordle is a web application that generates ‘word clouds’ based upon text, RSS feeds, or del.icio.us usernames.

Here’s what Wordle managed to create from my del.icio.us tags (click image to see larger image):

Visually, it’s quite stimulating. I might like this word cloud on a poster, or on a T-shirt that I can wear while I’m playing C64 games in my parents’ basement. None of the words are hyperlinked, which is a bit of a drag. Nor can I zoom in to look at the tiny little words. It’s also clear that, in determining the spatial arrangment of tags, the Wordle algorithm doesn’t look at ‘related tags’ associations in del.icio.us. (E.g., there’s nothing in my word cloud to indicate a connection between “wingchun” and “kungfu”.) Rather, Wordle appears to have sized my tags according to their frequency, and come up with a ‘best fit that looks good’. And look good it does.

Has anyone managed to run Wordle on LibraryThing (tags, authors, etc.), lib.rario.us or something similar?

Lively at LibrariDan’s Den

Lively is a browser-based, 3-D chat application from Google. There’s a plugin download & install required. In Lively I can rofl while typing “rofl”. This is somewhat more stimulating than what happens when I type “rofl” in Second Life (which to me feels like being trapped inside of an art house movie).

I’ve embedded my Lively room below using an iframe. You’ll need to install the Lively plugin and login to you Google account in order to visit my room. I may not appear very lively, as I’m doing collections work today. Try chatting with me and we’ll both find out if Lively delivers anything by way of an alert. One shortcoming I’ve noticed is that Lively doesn’t appear to delivery anything by way of an alert when someone sends an IM.

You can also link to LibrariDan’s Den via the link in the upper right corner of this blog. If I’m not logged-in, about all you’ll see is the decor… currently a chair! (Note: page removed)