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.