IM Reference
Having used IRC many years ago, I’d gotten over the whole instant messaging thing as a huge waste of time but recently had a good experience of it when discussing some Fez issues with a user in Portugal. Compared to email, IM allowed us to exchange more information in smaller chunks and I found that I asked more questions than I would in email. This morning I came across the blog post linked below about using IM for library reference queries. I am using Miranda for my IM needs now but have also found gmail chat pretty good because you can google search your past chats which is handy.
Just how much university students appreciate it was driven home to me yet again last night. I was doing an instructional session in a class with mostly seniors. When I mentioned that our Ask-A-Librarian page listed the screen names in AOL IM and Yahoo Messenger for asking questions of a Reference Librarian, the students went nuts. They thought it was very cool and wondered why they’d never known about that before.
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, January 10th, 2007 at 10:15 am by Matthew Smith and is filed under Libraries.
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January 11th, 2007 at 6:43 pm
The popular IM software would be good for chat. But, since we get quite a number of students using the Ask a service when they’re actually in the library (!) we would end up having to get the software installed on library computers. Or, were they talking about their general screen names that they use outside of work?