I was thrilled to wake up this morning to the new release of meebo, complete with chat rooms (just in time for my session – shame I ran out of time & had to skip over it)! There are all sorts of use cases for libraries here, from small group chats with subject specialists or liaison librarians, to chat sessions with a librarian and an IT specialist to help with the tech stuff (we’ve done this in Trillian, using the plain, old “invite” feature). Definitely worth a look if you’re planning an IM reference service!

An interesting thought. I’m not overly fond of the term “technology evangelist”, but I guess I do a lot of that, both at my institution, and as part of the Web 2.0/Library 2.0 talks that I do at other institutions. But for me, and I suspect for a lot of other people in our library world who have been talking about these technologies for a while, the really crucial question I encourage people to ask themselves first is “what need is this going to fulfil or what problem will this fix?” When we implemented a blog at my institution two years ago, it was to fulfill a couple of really specific needs:

• we needed a better way to archive our news stories
• we needed to provide more people with an easy way to add news content (without having to know html)
• we needed an easy way to repurpose news content on the rest of our site

So, yeah, not hard to guess that a blog would fulfill these needs. We went through the same exercise before we implemented our IM reference service last year: we knew that a large number of our users worked virtually, yet we had limited services to assist them (e-mail only). We also knew that most of them were on MSN (as evidenced by a glance at any given public workstation in the library!), so IM reference just made sense.

You can probably see where I’m going with this. There certainly is a cool-factor associated with these “shiny new toys”, but implementing them for the sake of their “shininess” makes no sense. If your library’s cool-factor goes up as a result of implementing any of these tools, that’s a nice incidental benefit (by the way, I don’t think my library’s cool-factor budged when we implemented our blog/rss feeds. When we implemented our IM service? Through the roof. If that means our users like it and will use it, I’ll take it. Is that why we implemented it? Of course not).

• how to create an IM account
• intro to IM presentation
• IM tips
• IM canned messages

• 94% of young people say they go online from home
• 23% of students have their own cell phone
• 51% of Grade 11 students access the Internet from their own personal computers
• 28% of Grade 4 students use IM
• 86% of Grade 11 students use IM
• 89% of Grade 4 students are online gamers
• 14% of Grade 4 students blog

You already know what I’m going to say, right? If you work in a public library in Canada, these are your users; if you work in an academic library in Canada (as I do), these are your users next year. Plan accordingly. The great thing about studies and reports like this one is that they provide ammunition during those planning stages (for anyone in your organization who needs convincing that yes, it IS a good idea to try out an IM reference service; or yes, it IS a good idea to expand your info literacy program to include sessions on blogging).

Here are a few more salient points:

• “Kids use the Internet to extend their existing social networks and develop new ones within their community”
• “When students are asked how they like to get their information for school assignments, the Net is the clear winner over books from a library. Sixty-two percent of Grade 4 students prefer the Internet, while 38 percent choose the library. Ninety-one percent of Grade 11 students prefer the Internet, with only nine percent choosing the library.” *
• “Despite their preference for the Net, young people recognize the drawbacks of getting information online. When students are asked what Internet-related subjects they would like to learn about in school, the top choice for 68 percent is “How to tell if information you find on the Net is true or not.” **

* & ** Fascinating, isn’t it? I think these two points, viewed back-to-back, make it pretty clear where we need to step up and improve our services and programming. What better way to do that than to meet them halfway (online) with services (IM) and programmes (Blogs for Teens! Fun Website Evaluation Classes!) they can relate to? Oh, the possibilities!

MSN and Yahoo Messenger will be glued together, forming the world’s largest instant messaging community at some 275 million combined users, the services’ companies announced on Wednesday… The resulting integration, due out in the second quarter of next year, will give users of both services typical IM abilities: to tell when their friends are online, to share some emoticons, to put through free PC-to-PC phone calls and to easily add new contacts from either service to their friends list.

The rest of the story is here. This bodes well for library IM reference service providers, of course, because it means one less IM login to worry about; and it bodes equally well for library IM reference service users since interoperability removes one barrier to access the library’s IM service. The fewer the barriers, the better.

Later: I’ve pretty much been using meebo exclusively over the past 48 hours. I started off by doing a feature-feature comparison with Trillian and ended up with a wishlist of features that, I later discovered, are mostly all accounted for in this forum thread. So, in lieu of a long-winded (and probably unnecessary report), I will say two things:

• the service is in alpha testing at the moment. That’s right, alpha. Which means a couple of bugs, quirks, and inconsistent load times. Have patience.
• I’m definitely going to keep using it and look forward to the next release. It’s a super-well-documented service (a forum and a development blog), and if you take the time to keep up with posts & developments, it will be hard not to love it too.

• launched June 6th, wrapped up August 5th;
• set up handles through AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, and ICQ;
• provided IM reference 11am-3pm, Monday-Friday;
• had 9 project participants doing IM (one at a time) from their computers & the reference desk computers (depending on how the schedule worked out) using Trillian;
• received an average of 2 questions per week (but tried not to feel discouraged about the number given that it was the summer, after all);
• received 100% positive feedback from users, zero negative feedback;
• took a LOT of getting used to on the part of the IM reference librarian;
• did very little PR for the pilot: Web page, added info on the service to our e-mail signatures (we do a rigourous email reference business), added online status buttons to our Web page (wanted to add them to our home page; couldn’t on account of the icons not being on our server and, therefore, our homepage being proxied in the library. Not cool. Must figure out way to get around this;), and post on our library blog.

Right now, I’m doing a bit of a post-mortem of the project and trying to come up with some recommendations (I love this one). Right off the bat, I can say that we will probably launch an ongoing service in the Fall. Also right off the bat, I can say that the service will be well used and students will probably love having the ability to IM us rather than just calling or e-mailing us. And, finally, right off the bat, I can tell you that the most difficult thing for us is going to be the logistics of staffing. I’ve been trawling the VR literature for staffing models used in regular ol’ virtual reference, to, you know, call upon best practices and engage in a bit of evidence-based librarianship. But, I am having no luck.

So, tell me, how do you staff your VR service (IM, chat, whatever)?