Category: Electronic Reference
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Yugma for screen-sharing
Another link from Sarah at LiB (this one via the lo-fi librarian): Yugma. I haven’t tried it, but it looks to be a solid option if you’re considering tools to share the desktop (co-browsing). The basic service is free and cross platform. It doesn’t offer voice over IP, so you’re stuck texting with whoever’s on…
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LiB on how to talk to IT about Instant Messaging (IM) and security issues
Sarah at Librarian in Black has a good post that will help you arm yourself against IT folk who claim allowing IM in a library is too dangerous. Sarah’s had a lot of experience in this area, and provides links to the two articles security people always seem to quote, along with links to three…
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Instruction via chat reference: does co-browse help?
The answer appears to be no, which surprised me. The authors, from Southern Illinois University, do caution that it’s a pretty small sample and not to draw many conclusions, but the evidence of their transcript logs seems to indicate that providing a co-browsing option along with chat reference doesn’t really add much instruction to the…
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Gaim renamed Pidgin
While more people seem to use Trillian, Gaim was a nice open-source alternative IM aggregator, and had the advantage of being able to incorporate Google Talk alongside AIM, MSN and Yahoo chat. Seems that after a long battle with AOL, Gaim has had to change its name to Pidgin. You can read about it at…
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Run Meebo in Firefox Sidebar
Lots of libraries seem to be using Meebo or MeeboMe to collect IM requests from multiple clients (AOL, MSN, Yahoo!, GTalk). Up until today I used Trillian to manage all my accounts. While Meebo works just fine, I didn’t like the fact that I had to have a web page open in order to see…
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Wavago now Raketu
A year ago I mentioned Wavago as an IM aggregator, along the lines of Adium or Trillian. I tried it, but didn’t like the interface so kept Trillian. I just got an email that suggests Wavago has been purchased by a product called Raketu, that will automatically import your Wavago clients, but that also supports…
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Huge list of screen sharing tools
I’ve mentioned sceen sharing / co-browsing tools like Jybe and Unyte before, but holy cow, take a look at the list compiled at Kolabora.com! That is all. Technorati Tags: Screen_sharing, co-browsing
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Linking to chat services in the catalogue
Stephen Francoeur at Digital Reference has an intriguing post about how the New Jersey Instititute of Technology has a feature in their catalogue where a search result that ends in no hits provides a link to the school’s virtual reference service. That’s a great idea! I’ve already told our Catalogue Wrangler how lucky he is…