Iris Jastram

From Social Software Showcase

Iris Jastram is a Reference and Instruction librarian at Carleton College. She also has a blog.

Introducing Meebo Rooms

For just over a year, libraries have been using Meebo as a free, simple chat reference application. Librarians can log in and receive Instant Messages (IMs) from patrons on multiple IM platforms (AIM, Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger, etc.). Libraries can also embed a chat box into any of their web pages so that patrons can chat with librarians without having IM accounts of their own (for example, see the St. Olaf Libraries’ main page). These have been quite popular, but now there’s a new option: Meebo Rooms.

On May 14th, Meebo announced the launch of Meebo Rooms. Meebo Rooms allow anyone with a (free) Meebo account to create a space where multiple people can chat at the same time. This means that multiple librarians could be in the room at the same time, or could overlap at shift changes. It would also be easy to refer questions to other librarians in this space. As an added bonus, librarians can choose their own screen names so that the entire reference service can seem more personalized to the patrons. Patrons can ask a named librarian for help rather than an unchanging and generic entity like “LibraryReference1234.”

Participants join rooms in one of two ways: clicking the room’s unique URL to enter the room in the Meebo environment (the URL is provided by Meebo when the room is created), or landing on a web page where a room has been embedded (such as a library's "ask a librarian" web page). Once in the room, participants can chat in full view of other participants, or they can message individual participants privately. They can also paste URLs into the chat box, and Meebo uses Snap to display web page previews in the “media window.” But it’s not just limited to page previews. A YouTube URL, for example, will play that video in the media window, which could be useful if patrons are looking for videos, or if the library has uploaded informational videos to YouTube. And if you’ve embedded your Meebo Room in a web page, your patrons can copy the code (using the handy “copy chatroom” button that comes with every embedded room) and put the room wherever they wish. If they have a web site, blog, MySpace page, or anything else that publishes HTML to the web, they can take their library with them to that space. It’s as easy as copy, paste, and publish.

[edit]

Step-by-Step Instructions (and places to play)

For detailed information about actually navigating through Meebo rooms, click over to this Flickr image set. There are screen shots of different views and dialog boxes complete with descriptions and instructions (be sure to click into the images themselves as I've embedded contextual notes in most of them). I’ve also created an example room and example embedded instances of that room.

[edit]

Things to Think About

As with any technology or service, there are several issues to consider if you want to implement Meebo Rooms as a chat reference service.

Participant Lists

[edit]

Librarians’ Screen Names

It’s probably a good idea if librarians use screen names that include some indication that they’re librarians. Guests to the room shouldn’t have to wonder if there are librarians available to help them.

[edit]

Message Length

Any given message can be 256 characters long, so if you're trying to type longer than that, you may have to break it into chunks.

[edit]

Chat Transcripts

Meebo retains the most recent 150 or so lines of chat so that guests entering a conversation can get caught up on what’s been happening in the room. These 150-odd lines of buffered conversation are completely public so any visitor can see them. Anything older than the lines in this buffer are caught in the chat transcipt if your room is public, but if it's password protected the chat is lost forever and not archived anywhere.

[edit]

Privacy

You may want to include some indication that chat transcripts are very, very public somewhere in the description of your Meebo Room or in the text portion of the web page housing the embedded room. Anything participants type into the message box can be seen by any other visitors to the web site or Meebo Room. Of course, visitors need not reveal their names, and they can message librarians privately. Librarians can also initiate private messaging as soon as patrons indicate they need help. Private messages are not archived either, but they do not appear in the public chat log.

[edit]

Lack of Documentation

Meebo has very little formal documentation, so users often have to find and use new features without much help. There is a Meebo Wiki and a Meebo Forum for those who have questions, but neither of these is particularly comprehensive. Luckily, the service is generally pretty easy to use.

[edit]

When you’re in the Meebo environment (as opposed to being in an embedded instance of a room), you may be treated to occasional video ads. You can close the media window to shield yourself from these occurrences, though, so I have been able to avoid watching one of these ads ever since the first day Meebo launched. (As far as we can tell, there are no ads in the embedded rooms.)

[edit]

Language Filters

Configuring Meebo Then there are the language filters. Meebo censors what it thinks is bad language from being publicly viewable. The person who writes the offending word will see exactly what he or she wrote, but everyone else in the room will see a series of asterisks. Amusingly, Meebo finds these offensive words embedded in perfectly acceptable words, so “document” becomes “do***ent” as Meebo goes above and beyond the call of duty to protect us from foul language.

[edit]

Spam

It took spammers three weeks to figure out that they could find popular Meebo Rooms and insert links to off-color sites (none of which previewed in the media window, thankfully). This has been reported to Meebo, so presumably they’re working on ways to counter the spammers. But for now, room owners can password protect their rooms to foil spammers. Password protecting rooms removes the language filter function, but it unfortunately makes embedded rooms useless. Still, if libraries password protect their rooms, patrons can still click into the room, enter the password, and use the room in the Meebo environment.

[edit]

So is it worth it?

Only you can know the answer to that question. But consider starting a pilot project just to experiment with this simple and free service and see if it it fits.

And if it doesn’t fit as a service point for your library, consider poking around in one of the rooms where librarians hang out together. Joshua M. Neff started a room for the Library Society of the World, and it’s been both amusing and professionally useful to quite a few librarians. (This room is password protected, but the password is no secret. Simply contact any of these people if you want to join.) Alternatively, libraries could set up these rooms as spaces for their own librarians to collaborate together.

[edit]