Instant Help: IM at the Reference Desk

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Instant Help IM at the Reference Desk

• Valery King
• Oregon State University Libraries
• Online Northwest February 16, 2007

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Suitability for Ref Desk

• easy to use
• ubiquitous among college students
• student (including library workers) already use
  and love it
• many ref desk questions are suitable to IM
  (short)
• Inexpensive!only investment is the time it takes
  to set it up lots of free software available

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Staff buy-in

• Need very little training
• Head of Reference mandates placement on every
  librarians desktop, then the hard-core believers
  begin to IM everyone!
• Get used to IM in a safe environment before
  going live with patrons
• Bring up at staff meetings, get inputencourage
  input all the time

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Ask a Librarian webpage
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Christmas intersession (3 weeks)
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(No Transcript)
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(No Transcript)
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Introduction of Browser Widget (Chatango)
December 2006
Chatango
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(No Transcript)
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Issues to address

• Collecting statistics
• Widget with more features enterprise software?
• Better and more obvious presence on more OSU web
  pages

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Questions?