September Meeting Minutes
September 7, 2007
This month we discussed instant messaging. Peter Zuber discussed how they use IM in science. You can check out their client through any science subject page. Science uses PLUGOO as an interface. You can find more about it a www.plugoo.com. Peter said that they have had moderate success with this showing sometimes several questions a day. Andy Spackman discussed how MEGI uses MEBO on their business page. Check it out at http://www.lib.byu.edu/business/. MEBO can be found at www.meebo.com, look for the Meebo Me Widget. Andy indicated that while traffic was slow over the summer it is really picking up now and they see a noticeable difference in the number of transactions. We ended with a discussion the pros and cons of this form of communication especially as it relates to reference services. There was discussion of how this is different from the Chat Ref that we tried and abandoned. There was also discussion of how the students use this for communication and how it really fits their needs when they are on subject pages and need an answer. The group was asked if this should go library wide or not, and it was decided that there were pros and cons to this. It was also asked if support could be put forward for programming or if contacting the developers of the programs we saw today could help us to develop features we may want. We will certainly revisit this topic as more people implement IM reference to see how implementations are working.