While AOL, MSN and Yahoo! compete for users we should be offering our services to any person using IM. This being the case, a key best practice in IM in libraries is using a multinetwork piece of software (such as Trillian) so that no potential library IMmers are alienated.
I’ve been living in bad faith for quite some time, only offering patrons AOL Instant Messaging. I knew it wouldn’t take long to set up accounts on their other network, but for whatever reason never got around to it. I finally took the time today and I felt relieved. It would have only taken 5 minutes to do but I needed to download a patch to get Trillian to work with Yahoo! Figuring this out and installing it took another 10 minutes.
It will be interesting to see if offering IM over these other networks will change the type of questions we get. Anecdotal evidence tells me that younger people use AIM while older people perhaps prefer MSN or Yahoo!
Now I just have to get out the word.
Word.
Comments
Interestng – i was wondering how libraries were handling this – did the staff have to intereact with three clients (oy vey!) or would we go with something like Trillian – which even in its “Basic” product offers pretty full functionality for additional features, like multi-person chat and file transfer.
Obviously it would be much easier to do support and training on a single IM platform rather than three or more clients. Have you done much staff training and if so, has it been on Trillian or each individual IM client?
And is anyone in your library using a non-Windows platform? That appears to be about the only drawback to going with Trillian.
Have you considered doing a full-blown Jabber server in your library?
And last question – what do you do with your stored chat logs? Do you have a script that empties them? Have you ever used them for training purposes?