The Archies 246

I’ve just been watching a conversation at the Alliance Virtual Library in Second Life. The gatekeeper, Franja Russell, has been advising a total newbie, Kingjames Hermit on land rentals inworld.

I met somebody, newer than I, named Niky Dirval too. He logged in from Spain, and spoke enough English (or “Inglish,” as he called it) to carry on a converstation with me. I ran into Niky in the Palmetto Library, in Cybrary City (as I was casting about for reference librarians). Actually, Niky ran into me. Or, really, he walked right up to me. It was as if he had materialized on the spot; not only because he was suddenly upon me, but also because he kept insisting he had never been here or anywhere else on these premises before. As it happens he was wearing something very close to the same skin wore when I created my SL account.

It was a little surreal. Did he birth himself right on this spot? Here he was, the very newest version of me – fazed and unable really to communicate fluently because of the language barrier – and he kept asking me to tell him what to do. Me. I was almost as lost. I talked with him a spell and then gave him a landmark to the Help People Tutorial site. I could not think how else to help, but I had at least been around long enough to go that far. The subject line for this blog bears Niky’s final salutation to me before he teleported away. I had wished him good luck and buenas suerte. I think “lo Mismo te Digo” means something like “the same for you.” Very Cool. And he may already be passing me by. Sunrise, sunset.

I visited an in-world archives, the Aero-Astro Nasa Colab archives, also in Cybrary City. At this self-built place I met the owner, Archivist Llewellyn, who graduated from Kent State with her LIS degree in 2005. She showed me her films and the books for which she has either added pages or embedded a link. I could tell she was really proud of her place. I followed here around from one exhibit to the next. She stood over my left shoulder sort of watching me watch a video, and occasionally asking questions like “pretty neat, huh?” Archivist posed for me in front of one of her displays (though first she wanted to change her clothes.) She is resplendent:

When I had walked in, she was just then changing her clothes to jeans and a t-shirt. When I asked if I could take a photo, she requested that I come back in five minutes. She wanted to get dressed up again – into her flowing gowns. I posed her several times. The picture given above is not one of the poses. It is candid. It looks good, but it stands in here, because I did not save the posed pitctures carefully enough. No real matter, though. The best pictures are saved to my inventory, and I shared them with Archivist. She was pretty excited about getting her SLUR in this post, so if you are reading this please visit her.

Archivist told me just before I left that she is expanding her archives, and including a section on African-American influence within NASA. I told her that was great and requested that she keep up the good work … and noted that she was probably telling me this because I appeared there as a black man – or really, I guess, I was a black man. I mean … fascinating. The Second Life interface allows us to evoke almost anything we want or do not even want. Again, very cool. [She also taught me how to link to the SLURL]

The Nasa CoLab Archives seems to be unique in Cybrary City in that the owner likes to be there and continue to work on her library. Having been there (Cybrary City) several times, I have had a devil of a time finding actual reference workers. At The Mark and Emily Turner Memorial Library, I managed to IM the owner, reference librarian Sonja Morgwain. As I stood in her library on my own (She was at Info Island International at that point) she explained that most of the Cybrary City organizations are self-serve. The whole SIM tends to be crowded only during events and book discussions. She invited me to join the book discussion group in the Readers Garden next to the Turner Library (I accepted). The Turner Library itself is rather sparse. The theme seems to be Maine-based authors (the RL Turner Library is in Presque Isle, Maine).

The teleport landing at Info Island International is really the best place, as far as I am concerned, to meet and chat with librarians or other reference type personnel. I’ve dropped in several times to shoot the breeze with (and sort of interrogate) Soup Johnson, Katfancy Kiergarten, Gareth Otsuka, Siren Tunwarm, BuddhistLibrarian Ballyhoo (goes by Bud) and Alacrity Lorefield. Dropping by this hub may be the best thing a newbie and LIS student can do to get going in SL. I now have several dozen links to SL libraries (most of them in Cybrary City, and most usually empty), new group memberships, tips on skin-buying, a circle of people who already recognize and seem to “get” me (clique-y, kind of), and some understanding about the way things work. As a matter of fact I met Sonja Morgwain here; she friended me, and then I teleported to her library and chatted with her as I looked around. I noticed with Archivist at the Nasa CoLab, and with pretty much everybody I met at Info Island, that people are not at all shy about posing for photographs. My favorite so far has been Siren, shown here as she appeared the other night (I had not yet learned how to get most of myself out of the frame):

The next night I sat where Siren is sitting here and chatted with Soup, Bud and Alacrity. Eventually I stood up and posed them on the wall:

I have a friend – let’s call him Bean (his real name). Bean is a tech support specialist at Apple. He is 38 years old. He lives with his girlfriend Jen in midtown Sacramento. Bean is a hardcore gamer. At least I think he is. Recently he has been role-playing in Fable II. That was last week, anyway. I wonder if he’s finished it yet. The thing was released almost a month ago, after all. C’mon Bean!

I like hanging out with Jen and Bean; I wish they came over here more than they do. That’s partly because there is no screen to hog all the attention and suck all the energy out of the room in my place. That’s how hardcore this dude is. He is a sparkling conversationalist, more sharp-witted than most I know, passionate, engaging. But man, I am sure I have never been to their house once – not once (no, that is not true: once).- where for the entire time somebody there was not engrossed in a game, sometimes me. The conversation picks up during smoke breaks.

I’m really bad at it, but my favorite game is Guitar Hero; any version, really, since I’m a beginner every time. Last time I was trying to master the bass licks for Heart Shaped Box. Gawd, what a rush! The thing that amazes me most though is the cerebral fact that there is something else contributing to the experience – something beyond the twitchy attempts at coordination. Just accessing the game takes savvy. It’s nothing, really, for Bean or Jen. They’ve internalized the process. But I have to take a moment each time to realize I need to treat this television-like thing in the middle of the room as I treat a file-system on the LAN at work. That is not really easy for me. It requires a shudder and a shift from my upbringing … from my customary environment (not that this is a huge difficulty, but I have to go through it). Here is why we have stereotypes (and stereotypes are exaggerated but rooted in truth) about old people who are naturally technophobic. “They” cannot figure out anything as simple as their new television remote control because their new television remote control is not actually so simple. The operating system it serves demands so much more than what they are accustomed to doing for a TV program. Any sort of popular remote control system at all has only been introduced during my own lifetime. Before that we just turned a couple of knobs.

This goes for games too. I played Pong on Atari game systems when I was young. Hooking up the box, switching the toggle to “on,” and turning a dial to move the paddle up and town … so simple. Sigh. Now I need years of experience and a brief lecture before I can play Guitar Hero, a game that in itself requires only a little more hand-eye-ear arrangement than Pong used to do. Others on the other hand – the role-playing games, the battle games, the popular culture and trivia games – require as much or more concentration and attention as the set-up and the accessing of the games. You have to read. You have to know maps. You have to make connections. You have to think in abstractions. And you have to know your joystick like you know your keyboard with its shortcuts.

I like that Jenny Levine connected gaming to television as a way to illustrate the growing complexity of popular culture by discussing Steven Johnson’s book Everything Bad is Good for You. I never read the book, but I did catch Johnson on a couple of interviews. Arguing that entertainment grows ever more complex, demanding ever more of the audience, he illustrates his point with the curve of television narrative. In fact, Levine refers to the 1970′s cop show Starsky & Hutch as an example of the old bare, simple form of content, whereas Johnson himself has said that show indicates the beginning of the trend upward. The main part of the show was always straightforward and tended to tell one story that stood by itself. But there were always bookends – some added dimension to the story featured in the show’s opening moments, and returned to again in the epilogue. These dimensions were usually comical, supernumerary to the plot, but they required a shift in perspective of some sort: e.g., Starsky’s car needs a tune-up, or Hutch meets a girl in a bar, then sees her again before the closing credits (which will be plastered over a series of freeze-frames from the episode to recall what we just watched). Progressively, programs have been adding fancier structure, tangled plots, multiple lines. Shows like Hill Street Blues, Thirty-Something and LA Law in the 1980′s; Ally McBeal and NYPD Blue in the 1990′s; CSI, The Sopranos and The Shield in the 2000′s. I recently finished the last season of The Wire. Everything that is said about this show is true. It is not to be missed, and it is not a show that forgives missing a single episode. I used to subscribe to HBO, but having missed the first couple of seasons of The Wire I could not jump in to it. I needed to go back to the early season DVDs. It’s epic, operatic, tragic, terrifically difficult and eminently rewarding. It inspires the viewer to read, to study, to follow the reality it reflects. It does not only demand, it compels. By the time we get to The Wire we have come almost impossibly far from the time Lucy met Bill Holden in the Brown Derby, or the time Whitey talked Beaver into getting trapped in that billboard coffee cup.

The challenge presented by much programming reflects the challenge involved with accessing it in the first place. Credit the environment. The challenge of gaming extends beyond the content of the games. Credit the environment. It is a challenging environment – but, again, a rewarding one. It is rather difficult for me to imagine LAN parties and Dance, Dance Revolution competitions being hosted within the walls of any traditional library. But we are moving into that period where the walls are tumbling down for some purposes. Library blogs like this one maintained by the Ann Arbor District Library in Michigan provide the necessary background for gamers so they may discuss not just events, but what is new in their world and how to navigate in it. Navigation is key; no ship ever made port without a competent navigator (or set of navigators). Everything I have been writing so far in this post touches on this fact.

The skills that gamers cultivate are comprehensive. They take an encyclopedic approach to life, and what they do is necessary and marketable. I remember an old Far Side cartoon (I’ve been trying to find it online, but have not yet). The caption says something like “Hopeful Parents.” It depicts a middle-aged couple standing in the middle of their living room. They are watching their little boy who sits on the floor before the television with a joystick in his hand. The two parents share a thought-bubble featuring a set of future classified ads, each one of which is geared to the skills their boy is mastering: “Nintendo Expert Needed – $75,000 per year;” “Can You Save the Princess? – $100,000 per year;” that sort of thing. It seemed hilarious at the time. Totally absurd. I think Gary Larson, though, turns out to be an unwitting prophet.

I have been using iTunes, both on PC’s and Macs, for podcast subscription and organization for a couple of years. My regular list has included several regularly updated entries from NPR such as To The Best of Our Knowledge, This American Life and It’s All Politics. Also included: CBC’s The Best of Ideas, The Yale Press Podcast and Joe Frank Radio. Kind of a pretentious menu. I incline a little to the cerebral and weighty. Typically the shortest episodes from this short list are those from Joe Frank – usually about 15 minutes. Those from The Best of Ideas clock in at usually a bit more than an hour each. My poor little iPod (I have a 4 gig nano) gets crammed. Most of these shows are mainstream enough that I can catch them on the radio, but I do enjoy the “on-demand” aspect (mentioned by Greg Schwartz in this presentation). I like taking very long walks, and well-produced, very long discussions about culture, philosophy, politics, medieval history or what have you, when I want them, are nice to take along.

Being familiar (though not really overly familiar) with iTunes already, I downloaded the Juice Receiver, another podcast directory and aggregator. The interface is nice enough, compact and clean:

Still, it has not impressed me enough to forsake iTunes (if “forsake” is the right term). I have not discovered that it does anything more or better. Juice lists as one of its virtues the fact that it focuses primarily on podcast management, as opposed to iTunes, say, which also handles music, music videos, films and television programs. It may be supposed that an application that keeps a singular focus can do that thing it does better than another application trying to do so many other things. I have several acquaintances that see this as a rule of thumb and would probably be inclined to favor a receiver like Juice, if they were use any at all. For me, managing my podcasts is not a crucial matter, and iTunes seems perfectly well up to the modest task.

From the above image you can see a couple of the podcasts I accessed through Juice: Valuecube is a vanity project from a couple of Texas wisecracks. Their episodes are long, minimalist (no intro music or anything), and full of expletives, irony and disassociated kvetching. I love it! (Not really … it’s okay. I mean, whatever). I subscribed to this through the Juice directory. Coffee Break French is a series of short episodes (averaging about 10 minutes) consisting mainly of conversation between “teacher Mark and student Anna” as they galavant around the French contryside talking about how to talk your way through France speaking French. Or something like that. The series is currently at number #40 which is the end of the beginning of the course. A full cast of characters join the principals. This sounds like a cool language primer to me, and an introduction to modern French life. I found this on Podcast Alley, in the Education topic, and posted the feed URL into Juice.

Another semi-interesting podcast I found in the same Podcast Alley directory as Coffee Break French: Harry Potter Prognostications is, according to the descritpion, “a podcast that delves into the literary, religious and philsophical sources and themes of the Harry Potter books and movies, and uses them to attempt to make predictions as to the eventual outcome of the books.” As the books have all been written, I half-expected this series to have run its course; rather it is still being regularly updated (about once every week or so), and it seems that the creators indeed do consider the more abstract themes connecting the Potter world to this one. I subscribed to this one by pasting the feed URL into iTunes. In fact I already have a subscritption through iTunes to another Harry Potter-related podcast, The Leaky Cauldron, described as “THE Harry Potter Podcast.” Now I am not a huge Harry Potter fan, but I have read all the books and seen all the movies to date. And I enjoy listening to adults – speaking with them – about their kind of grown-up perspective on the literature. Such discussion is not a huge drain on mental resources, but can be satisfying. The former series of podcasts (Prognostications) scratches that itch for me. The cast seems genuinely curious (but not really too serious) about mythology, literary themes, character archetypes and such – I will enjoy taking the time sometime to go back and hear what predictions these reflections led them to before the books were finished. The latter (Leaky Cauldron) is a series more for the unapologetic fan of all things Potter and all things Rowling. It features a large group of undergraduate-aged fanatics discussing events, things that would be cool to see in upcoming Potter films, things that would have been cool in the books, how exotic and interesting Evanna Lynch is (plays Luna Lovegood in the films), and that sort of thing. This podcast enjoys the endorsement of J.K. Rowling herself, who frequently contributes to the show, via recorded introductions. They regard the author with a mixture of genuflection and familiarity; they refer to her as Jo (that’s annoying).

At the same time, I have added a couple of new subscriptions to iTunes through iTunes, by browsing the iTunes store. This Internet-based (free for podcasts, not free for anything else) browser may be one of those things (like a glinty toy) that represents too much effort directed away from serious podcast management if any Juice partisans are ringing into the dsicussion, but I still like it. I know that Jeffra has been having difficulty with iTunes lately, so I cannot recommend it completely — but so far it has been good to me. I subscribed this week to Bub.blcio.us, which is really more of a videocast. This series, and the blog which supports it, looks anew at the new Social Economy 2.0. I just discovered it, and have not delved very deeply, but I like the attitude, accepting and embracing the 2.0 concept, but not cheerleading for it. Sharp and critical, both ways, and always irreverent, in the best sense (Leaky Cauldron’s reverence being the standard to use). I also subscribed here to The Onion Radio News Podcast. Little nuggets of absurdity. If you are at all familiar with The Onion – and who reading this is not – I need say nothing more.

I also subscribed to one of the podcasts recommended by Greg Schwartz (presentation linked above) – Eat Feed: The Sound of Good Food. I love good food done right. I enjoy cooking … consider the kitchen to be the second most romantic room in any house. I am a long, slow cooker and a midnight diner (catch my drift? No? Okay. Let’s move on). Unfortunately, it seems that this series petered out, the last entry posted in mid-January, 2008. But given the quality of the content I understand how this might have been one of those very good things which may simply have required too much effort to sustain. But good it was. The last episode discusses the obvious and not so obvious distinctions between Atlantic and Pacific oysters, how either should be prepared, what wine served with, and what ambient music for pete’s sake.

I relied upon two other sites recommended by Schwartz to subscribe through my RSS reader. I signed up for the Emerging Technology series within IT Conversations and Today in Music History within Coverville. Now, I am not sure, but it seems you have to be able to subscribe to your particular RSS reader for particular podcast series’s (Google Reader in my case). Really, I’ve yet to tease all this out. For instance, though, the NPR podcasts I mentioned way up their above allow subscriptions through iTunes, MyYahoo, and Zune. Additionally, you can paste the feed URL into whichever application you prefer, or download the MP3 directly to you computer. These two sites featured syndication buttons directly to Google Reader. The first of these, Emerging Technologies, I have not had an occasion to dig into, but looks promising. The last episode (13 minutes long) features Steve Cousins, and discusses a new open source platform that will “encourage users to get inside the code and tinker around the way early automobile enthusiasts were encouraged to tinker around under the hood.” (I’m quoting but this is really paraphrase). This Day in Music History is an eminently digestible series of about five minutes for each episode. As suggested by the title it is updated daily. I mentioned in the podcast I submitted to this post that I would be interested in experimenting with continuous music underneath the text of podcasts. That is being done nicely here. These podcasts remind me of something that would be done by your local FM classic rock station, with bits of rock n’ roll trivia underscored by the appropriate song. Check this one out.

And what about library podcasts? There are many, good thing. For this week, I have nestled into those suggested by Meredith Farkas in chapter 11 of her book. Here is the link to the book with further links to the relevant sites. The site that immediately catches my eye is this one to Stanford University: Stanford U on iTunes. I have picked up several distinct episodes over the years from this site – interviews with resident philosophers such as the late Richard Rorty, and so forth. This podcast site features several categories of lecture – The Historical Jesus, Human-Computer Interaction, The Literature of Crisis – wonderful stuff. These are Stanford courses and invite the average man or woman to listen in. The user may subscribe trough RSS or directly through iTunes. (As a matter of fact this is also available from the iTunes U section in the podcasts section of iTunes, which is something even more). Now, again, I am not sure exactly what is happening here. The Stanford sites allows both of these options. Clicking on the RSS icon, I was offered the opportunity to subscribe through Google Reader. Many of the other sites mentioned in this post did not do so. A few others included the Google subscritpion icon (e.g., IT Conversations and Coverville). My feeling is that one simply does not become expert here in the course of a few days. This is something that requires, as the title here suggests, play. We are homo ludens. We learn best through unserious experiment. We adapt thereby.

But while we are on that subject, check out the podcasts available here, through Farkas’s links. Can this really be? The link to this site is described as “Bloomington Public Library Podcasts.” I don’t believe it. Click this sucker for yourself and see what I mean. Does the Bloomington Public Library promote head-banging metal and liberal use of the “F” word? I would not mind much, but I doubt that it does. I will add that this series (now defunct, apparently) did offer the Google Reader button. This next series, from Mabry Middle School in Marietta, GA. is more in line with what I think of when I think about library podcasts: Earnest, educational and participative. This site feeds directly into iTunes.

Man, what an embarrassment of riches. We live today, so we are told, on the edge of disaster. Disaster means wreckage, lack of order, sheer chaos. The world of podcasts dares us to make any kind of order out of it. The audioscape is dizzying. But the tools exist to help us carve out a picture. Our own picture. But if my picture looks nothing like yours, chaos reigns anyway. What am I saying? I don’t know. But fiddle away … play on.

I had never chatted with a librarian online before. And now that I think about it, I wonder if “chatting” is sometimes a rather unfortunate description for such an activity. The term de facto for it is indeed “online chat.” But this is a wide category that contains variations on user experience and sometimes stretches the traditional meaning of “to chat.” In Libr246 this week we have been experiencing several forms of synchronous communication: primarily IM, SMS text-messaging, “chat” rooms, voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) and webconferencing. These person-to-person or people-to-people real-time formats are easily distinguishable in kind from asynchronous technologies such as email, threaded discussion lists and blogs. In fact most of the items from the first list do facilitate rapid-response interaction and lend themselves to informal conversation. This is not to say they demand, or always devolve into informal conversation, but they make it easy to chat … online. In her recent Sirsi Dynix presentation with Aaron Schmidt, Sarah Houghton-Jan notes that some librarians she knows complain that many patrons tend to be a little too chatty and too informal in IM reference interviews. But, she points out, many patrons tend to be just as chatty in face-to-face interviews. I am not sure I agree completely. Can there not be something about synchronous text discussions that might tempt people to be more digressive than they would otherwise be in something that is essentially a business transaction? It may deserve study. But the moral of her point must be that instant messaging is at least as open to chat as any medium for conversation, including close, personal proximity.

The Online Reference page of the Library Success Wiki lists dozens of libraries using all manner of synchronous referencing tools. The longest section here lists libraries using Meebo software. Meebo is a free IM client host allowing users to access several IM accounts from one site. And Meebo is itself an IM service with conferencing and real-time video communication features, etc. Almost universally, Meebo libraries use embedded widgets to offer immediate contact with reference librarians (as long as one is online). See this example from the University of Virgina (note that a text-messaging service is also offered from the same page). A similar widget is embedded in the left sidebar of my own site (see?). Patrons’ questions are delivered to the library’s account on Meebo, in an individual IM window. Several chats may be taking place at once, one window per chat for the librarian, but for each user the conversation unfolds in the widget text window.

Meebo’s IM client hosting software affords various uses their widgets. Here, Ohio University Libraries offers three synchronous reference services, IM, online chat, and VoIP through Skype. OUL uses Meebo for both IM and chat. Honestly, I am hard-pressed to discern the real difference in cases like these. It seems that the concepts – IM and online chat – are blended here. The widget from OU’s chat tab functions exactly as the widgets embedded on UV’s site and in this blog. The widget from the IM tab does also, but add to it now the capacity for the patron to access the librarian, not from OU’s website, but from their own IM service. If the patron is a regular user she may add Ohio University to her “buddy list” for either AIM, Yahoo Messenger or MSN Messenger, and chat from one of those tools. OU’s screen names are listed on their IM tab.

Free web-based IM and chat applications such as Meebo are ridiculously easy to use, and, for the most part, very effective (I say that, admittedly, prima facie: I’m just breaking in). Commercial virtual reference software typically includes more features, and accordingly involves more effort and patience on the user’s part up front. One such service is QuestionPoint. Hosted by OCLC, QuestionPoint relies on collaborative reference from networks of libraries. This lends a wealth of human resources to the service, so that, whereas small library systems may be restricted in the hours they can dedicate to synchronous reference, cooperatives like this operate around the clock. It also affords a larger knowledge base, so that questions may be directed to specialists along the network. To facilitate this the service uses back-end tools to track and manage web-based questions. QuestionPoint software, and others like it, also allows a form of screen-sharing whereby the librarian and user may scroll through linked websites together

I opened this post saying I had never before chatted online with a librarian. Though I have recently been looking at several services (mostly in academic libraries – the heaviest users) from around the country, I have been reluctant to bother them with my interloping, non-enrolled-student, out of state citizen status. If you look again at the VU library reference page, notice that it asks that only registered VU students use the chat. But I am a student at San Jose State, and a resident of Sacramento. Both SJSU and Sac State belong to a QuestionPoint network. Either school’s online reference link takes the user to the same starting point. Several fields are presented for the user to fill out first, including name, email address, school, and reference question. This last field is used to direct the question to, I guess, the ideal person. The page also includes a set of guidelines and instructions. Reading these we can see that this software will save the transcript of our session, including any links the librarian shares with us. Once the initial form is submitted the user is taken to the “chatroom,” a page which includes still more instructions, and suggestions for use. I had to wait several minutes before my librarian was online with me. In the meantime I was invited to refine my question if I wanted. I had two questions: I wanted to know if a certain book was available at Sac State, and whether I could use my SJSU Tower card to borrow it (or did I need to use ILL). Somebody from CalPoly eventually arrived, and after some search discovered that the answer to the first question was yes (and here is the reference number), while the answer to my second question was indeterminable. For that I would have to contact the library itself.

I am sure there are reference questions better suited to the screen-sharing and mutual website browsing features of software like this. Of course I could have used the Library OPAC and gotten as much information in less than half the time. Several minutes passed between each response from the librarian. This it why I think that in some cases, the term “chat” is a little loose. Incidentally, I have not yet received the interview transcript. Afterwards I hitched up my trousers and chatted with someone from OUL through their Meebo widget. I wanted to know something about how they used it, how the chat widget related to or differed from the IM widget, what this practice was like from the librarian’s perspective. In other words, I asked really nothing to do with reference. In any case, the discussion was full, informative, chatty (after four or five questions she asked if I was a library student), and answered all of my questions. Most of my Meebo widget description above came out that interview. Not fair, perhaps. I did not test her ability as strictly a reference librarian. But I did get what I wanted, and fast. I copied and pasted my interview because no transcript delivery system is available (neither are many of the other features QuestionPoint boasts).

There is apparently much issue regarding IM versus chat (and here I chuckle, because I’m still confused: how can the QuestionPoint experiment be an example of the second category, and the Meebo experiment not?) Which is more effective? Expensive and sometimes slow, but impressive commercial software? Free and technologically limited, but surprisingly facile web-based IM software? (Or, where both can be available, why not?) The Strange Libraian, in a post from 2007 catalogs some of the pros and cons of both formats -as they existed then: these things are always under development – and votes pretty resoundingly for IM (the inherently more chatty format). For her it comes down to the difficulty of “moving the question” along the vast network, to a librarian who will likely never speak with the patron again. The Strange Librarian likes the personal touch:

We need to build relationships with our customers. Relationships change lives. Relationships create fan clubs, folks who are willing to help you out when you’re in a bind (like when your library needs $$, or an individual is going through a crisis). The only thing that can build relationships (besides, actually caring to), is “face to face” time; if you don’t have contact with someone more than once, how can you build a relationship with them?

Whatever the virtue of this particular value, I think it better represents the kind of environment that engenders real chat “chat.”

QuestionPoint has recently introduced a widget of its own, very similar to Meebo’s widget, designed to duplicate it’s simplicity, except resting on the QuestionPoint system. This could be an example of best of both worlds, offering something like IM in addition to full virtual reference. I would think that if a cooperative uses QuestionPoint already, members would want to give it a whirl. I expect the interview itself to proceed more quickly, though the question management system would still bog the process down a little in the beginning. It’s early on this yet, and I don’t know how many reviews are out there. Here is .

I imagine the systems shiniest features – the transcripts, the links, the guided website tours – are not available with the widget. So this question becomes more important: how good is the chat?