Kang Bro Wiratma

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New and Improved Call History

If you've been in the admin interface lately, you might have noticed we have a new beta call history area. I think it's very cool. If you have more than one queue, you can look at your queues individually or all together. You can look at all the chats and IMs on your queues for a specific day or a date range; you can see things like how long it took each chat to get answered, the duration of each chat, and the operator that took a chat. You can sort by columns. You can bulk download transcripts. You can delete transcripts and entire call histories. You can save your call history to a csv file so you can play with it in Excel. The system identifies chats that went unanswered; often these are the patron coming back to say "thanks, bye" after the operator has closed their window. But sometimes they are actual missed chats, and it's great to be able to locate these easily to identify problems with a staffing model or little tech glitches. You can also read what those pesky IM system messages say and easily select them for deletion. Another thing Eric added in on my whim because it was fairly easy: you can hover over a guestID and see the detailed transcript rather than having to click into each one to read the transcript. It's all terribly exciting for those of us who have to prepare statistics for reports! If you have transcripts enabled, you'll see a link on your queue pages. You can also go directly to: <a href="https://libraryh3lp.com/calls">https://libraryh3lp.com/calls</a>, login with your admin account, and play with the new toy. Enjoy!

If you've been in the admin interface lately, you might have noticed we have a new beta call history area. I think it's very cool. ...

Help from our friends: new handout

I've loved meeting several wonderful new library colleagues while working on LibraryH3lp. Often, it starts with a quick chat, and this was the case when I first "met" Amanda Clay Powers earlier this week. She was preparing to present a whole bunch of talks at the <a href="http://mlctechfair2008.blogspot.com/">Mississippi Library Commission Tech Fair</a> and also wanted to have a handout about LibraryH3lp to include in a display about new ideas from ALA. Well, creating that kind of thing had never even occurred to me, and amazingly, that same day, she put together a wonderful one-page handout for the display and generously said it was OK to make it available here. So, I just uploaded it into the wiki in the <a href="http://code.google.com/p/libraryh3lp/downloads/list">downloads</a> section, and <a href="http://libraryh3lp.googlecode.com/files/handout-ver1.pdf">here you go</a>. Thanks, Amanda! You rock. While I'm talking about great colleagues, I'd also like to soundly thank all of you that have mentioned LibraryH3lp to other librarians and especially those who have been patiently answering e-mails from other librarians asking about the system (Ellen!). We've always wanted to have a good community support base, and you all are fulfilling that wish in spades. In other news, Eric's been working hard on improving the admin interface, and we hope to release the first upgrade, which offers better call history/transcript manipulation, very soon.

I've loved meeting several wonderful new library colleagues while working on LibraryH3lp. Often, it starts with a quick chat, and this ...

Localization available: customize widgets for other languages

We now have the ability to provide the chat widget in the language specified in the patron's web browser. However, we need your help to...

Meebo Me Gateway

Eric's been busy buffing up the gateways lately, and a Meebo Me gateway is the first visible result. This means that you can have multiple librarians monitoring your Meebo Me widget simultaneously. This gateway works just like the other gateways for AIM, Yahoo!, etc...., and Meebo Me chats can be transferred just like any other LibraryH3lp chat. Gateway primer: using your admin login, add the gateway to one of your queues, assign at least one librarian operator to the queue, and you're good to go. Your Meebo Me widget will come online when its queue is online, and your queue will be online when there is at least one operator for the queue online. If more than one operator is online for the queue, they'll all get the patron's first message, but only the first to send a reply will get connected to the patron. The other operators will see who nabbed the chat and will get disconnected from the patron. Note: if a queue was online when you added a gateway, you need to toggle the online/offline status of the queue in order for the new gateway to come online for the first time. The queue must go offline very briefly and then come back online. An easy way to accomplish this from the admin interface is to remove a queue's operators and then add them back. Have fun!

Eric's been busy buffing up the gateways lately, and a Meebo Me gateway is the first visible result. This means that you can have multi...

Send File for Patrons and Librarians

A couple of days ago, a "send file" option began appearing for operators who follow the chat management link at the start of a chat or IM. Today, this option was put into the patron's widget (it's the little folder/arrow icon in the widget). When a file is sent, a link appears in the chat for the receiving party in the form of: download from http://libraryh3lp.com/download/filename.ext Files sent during a chat are temporarily stored on the LibraryH3lp server. They currently have a shelf life of two days before being deleted. There is a size limitation of 10 MB per file. A file of any type can be sent. The ability to send a file during a chat can be very handy. Often, patrons chat when they are stuck on some kind of access problem. In a typical scenario, for whatever reason (off-campus user with proxy server trouble, a vendor with an out-of-date IP range, etc), your patron should be able to access something, and they just cannot. We all try to straighten these problems out at the root, but often, that takes time, and what the patron really needs right then is just a PDF or two so they can carry on with their research. Rather than e-mail these, you can now send them directly during the chat. Sometimes it's also nice for the patron to be able to send files to the librarian. One situation that sticks out in my mind is a patron with a question about how to cite something. She was trying to explain it to me, but then she simply sent her actual bibliography and paper, and it was suddenly much easier for me to understand her question. On another occasion, a patron sent me a PDF from one of our e-journals; the article had some missing pages, and I was able to see the problem immediately, look for a complete version, and notify the vendor of the problem. Enjoy! This is the last user control we have planned for the widget. For now. :)

A couple of days ago, a "send file" option began appearing for operators who follow the chat management link at the start of a cha...

Plugin for Pidgin

Today we're releasing the first version of our LibraryH3lp plugin for Pidgin (Windows version). It has the following features: <ol><li>Displays the full roll-back of a chat to the recipient of a transfer.</li><li>Repeats an incoming chat alert noise at a configurable interval in seconds until a librarian sends a message to the patron.</li><li>Automatically approves incoming buddy requests.</li><li>Automatically cleans up all those guest123456@libraryh3lp.com buddies that accumulate in your buddy list. </li></ol>The first feature, showing the full history of a chat to the recipient of a transfer, is a very helpful time saver. It means the the librarian answering a transferred chat does not need to follow the "chat management" link in order to read the prior discussion between the patron and the first librarian. The second feature, the repeating new chat alert sound, is especially handy for staffing models where it is not guaranteed that a librarian will be physically looking for incoming chats visually all the time. In my library's main chat service, we answer the chats on computers near, but not actually right at, the reference desk. We rely on sound alerts to let us know of incoming chats, and the looping sound prevents us from accidentally missing anything when the phone rings or we're away from the desk for a short time. It also lets staff nearby in their offices know when the desk is slammed and no one is immediately picking up a chat, so that we can pitch in on the fly to help out. You can set the repeat sound to suit your preferences: 60 seconds, 30 seconds, etc... Notes: <ol><li>The sound will not repeat for simple new responses from the patron once a chat is underway; it is limited to their initial message (see important configuration notes at the end of this post). </li><li>If more than one computer with the plugin receives a chat because multiple librarians are signed into the queue in question, the sound will stop looping on all the computers when the first librarian sends a response to the patron.</li></ol>The third feature, automatic approval of buddy requests, is useful for buddying other librarians who are staffing your services. This provides an easy method of librarian-to-librarian communication. To buddy another LibraryH3lp user, pick Buddies-->Add Buddy and enter the desired account. Example: marian-the-librarian@libraryh3lp.com. If you're using other accounts besides LibraryH3lp accounts in Pidgin, be sure to buddy to the right one. The plugin should also auto-approve similar requests from other systems. The last feature, automatic clean-up of guest accounts left by your patrons' chat sessions, is a nice housekeeping feature. To get the plugin: <ol><li>Save <a href="http://code.google.com/p/libraryh3lp/downloads/list">the plugin's zip file</a> from our wiki. </li><li>Unzip and save the libraryh3lp.dll file in Pidgin's plugins directory (usually c:\program files\pidgin\plugins\). </li><li>Enable the plugin in Pidgin at Tools-->Plugins. </li><li>Click configure plugin and set the desired interval for the new message alert sound.</li><li>Check Tools-->Preferences--Sounds and select message received begins new conversation. This is not turned on by default.</li></ol>(Edited 26 May 2008 to reflect the automatic buddy clean-up feature.) (Edited 16 Nov 2008 to generalize link to plugin zip file download.)

Today we're releasing the first version of our LibraryH3lp plugin for Pidgin (Windows version). It has the following features: Displays...

Hierarchy

It's not always immediately clear to new users why we make the distinction between "admin" and "user" accounts on the LibraryH3lp system. The short answer is that, with regard to issues of security and patron privacy, we need to be able to answer the question of anyone: who is the boss of you? When you create an admin account by signing up through the web interface, you're actually creating an administrative domain. You can create any number of queues, for any purposes, and any number of users. You can assign those users to queues in any fashion: for instance, someone might be both a subject expert and a general reference librarian, and should monitor multiple queues when logged in---you can do that. By creating those user accounts within the admin interface, you're explicitly defining the "boss" relationship. If everyone registered their own top-level account, we'd have to find some (more complicated) method of determining who can assign who to monitor what queues. (And who can view transcripts, etc.) But there's more to it than that. Within an administrative domain, your users are all "friends." If you created queues for reference and circulation, the operators on those queues can transfer chats to each other. Your reference staff can transfer chats to subject experts and vice-versa. You have a lot of ways to connect the patron to the librarian best suited to help them, quickly. But there's even more to it than that. Because aside from the boss relationship, there's really no difference between an admin account and an ordinary user account. More specifically, the users you create can in turn create their own users and queues and define their own service models. For example, if you started using LibraryH3lp in your university's main library and wanted to grow your service, you might start by creating accounts for each of your branch libraries. Then your branch libraries create their own users and define their own queues, and you don't have to manage all those details. But, because you created those accounts initially, everything they do falls under your administrative domain. Now you can transfer chats not only from reference to circulation, but you can directly connect patrons to your law library or health-sciences library. You can start thinking about staffing collaborative services with other libraries, either after-hours only or full-on collaboration, all the time. Even in the collaborative scenario, transcripts (if you opt-in to them) are still secure. The recipient of a transfer can, of course, see the prior history of that chat. But outside of that special case, librarians can only see transcripts of the queues they're assigned to, and only the owner of a queue can delete a transcript. And a reminder: this all applies equally to IMs. LibraryH3lp is more than just a pretty widget. Lastly, I want to note that, if by accident of history you do have multiple top-level admin accounts that you would like to consolidate into one domain, as described above, just let us know. We can make it happen.

It's not always immediately clear to new users why we make the distinction between "admin" and "user" accounts on th...