Meebo Me!!

Chit chat away with a librarian - anytime, anywhere. Now you don’t even have to go to a library to communicate with a trained information professional! Over the last few years more and more libraries have added a chat feature to their services available and some have even highlighted this by putting it directly on their index page like the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library did. Although, at the time I’m reviewing this, they are offline, the service is available during library business hours!

Because they have chosen to put this above the fold of their homepage, patrons should have an easy time finding and using this service, even if they have no previous exposure to chat. In fact, you do not have to be signed up to any existing chat service provider in order to use this, just start typing in the box that say ‘Type here’.

This widget works wonderfully with existing online services offered by TSCPL which includes RSS feeds, user generated comments, videos and tags. In fact, they use their Meebo widget in a very inovative way, whenever a patron gets a no search results on a particular keyword search, a box pops up asking what they needed help with and (if after hours) requests an email address to further help the patron. David Lee King blogs about this for the TSCPL here and here. I think this is an excellent way to stick librarians into unexpected places - very twopointohish! If I were a patron of this library, I would sure be using this tool because of the facility of its use and ubiquity of it.

The obvious way to improve this service would be to have it available 24/7, or have chat transcripts available for patrons personal records, but its pretty much perfect the way it is!

Tags: libraries, Public library, RSS