Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

Yeah, you know, maybe IM in libraries is a stupid idea. But how are we gonna know for sure unless we try?

My experience is that libraries/librarians in general want to take advantage of the new technologies, but what they really want is a product that tailors those new technologies to the specific needs and functions of a library. IM is great, as far as it goes, but a reference librarian really wants a co-browsing application in which he can not only push web pages but highlight text or areas of the screen for coaching, so that the remote patron will become more resarch-enabled herself. On top of which, it needs to be at least 99% server-side tech, because you can't count on a patron downloading and installing a huge application when Google is a click away.

These technologies exist, but they're not cheap and they don't all work very well. The tendency is for most libraries, who don't want to spend scarce budget dollars on dud tech, to sit back and watch the few early adopters until some clear winner emerges. Then within a short period that winner's application will be bought up by half the libraries in the country.

In the meantime, there's no specific technological reason they couldn't be using IM as a stopgap. There are often other reasons, though. Where I work, they boil down to staffing issues. We don't want to make it the on-duty desk person's job (there's enough else to do); we don't want to make it any one person's job all the time; and we don't have the budget to assign someone to it outside of normal operating hours, which would be when it's most in demand. So until we sit down and have a big brainstorm session about it (which may happen soon), we'll be sticking with the phone and e-mail. Which we do try to make as easy as possible for our patrons.