June 2007 Archives

For a while I thought meebo.com was only useful for accessing all of my instant messaging services from any computer. With the introduction of Meebo Rooms and the Meebo Widget you can now implement a multi-tiered library chat reference service (including video and a type of co-browsing).

First you can set up the Meebo Widget for any Instant Messaging account to allow library users to immediately start asking questions. This eliminates the need for them to add the librarian to their chat software and embeds the services on you page. This can be a single librarian or a shared account, but it is one account per Widget.

With the addition of Meebo Rooms you can create a "room" for a group of librarians that are serving the same population such as Science and Technology Librarians and then set up a meebo widget for users on your website to access the room. Then any librarian who is in this group and online can be "in" the room and available to answer questions.

The video and email links is a feature of Meebo Rooms that allows those in the room to share with each other. If the user is on the widget, they just see a link to what is posted, but if they are using Meebo and enter the room they can watch the video and see a preview of the website.

Another librarian's analysis of Meebo Rooms

Friday - New Members Roundtable (NMRT) Meet and Greet
Saturday - Science and Technology Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL-STS) Publications Committee Meeting
Sunday - ACRL-STS All Members Breakfast and Discussion Program, 3M/NMRT Social including presentation of 3M/NMRT Grant Winner award
Monday - ACRL-STS Program on Issues and Trends in Digital Repositories of Non-textual Information Support for Research and Teaching, NMRT New Chair and Board Member Orientation

I hope to use this blog to communicate news and learning tools about Science and Engineering (with a focus on Math and Statistics) to Penn State University faculty, staff, and students in addition to the academic world at large.