Thursday, May 21, 2009

Gearing up and gateways

Well, we have a date to present LibraryH3lp (and other project ideas) to our library director...June 4, 2009 at 2:30. Exciting! Of course, this now means I need to hurry up and get what I know about LibraryH3lp organized into presentable format (especially since I'm going on vacation all next week).

So, today, I created a handout detailing what LibraryH3lp is, how cheap it is (I figure given our current budget status, this needs to be a big point), how it works, what the challenges of implementing it are (best lesson of my 9th grade English class was that when making a persuasive argument, concede the opposition's best point and then go from there), and why we should do it. Next up is to figure out the best way to demonstrate the service during our meeting.

In line with demonstrating, I set up two new gateways today--Yahoo! Messenger and Meebo. They both seem to work fine (especially after I belatedly read the instructions to toggle your queue's online/offline status once setting up a gateway before continuing), except for one thing. From the "librarian side" of chatting, I can't see the patron going offline when I sign out of the "patron" account. I need to find out if this is because I'm exclusively using web-based chat widgets for testing, because I'm testing on just one computer, or what. Obviously, more testing is needed. I don't think I'm going to set up many more gateways before the meeting (maybe MSN if someone has an MSN account to test with--I'm slightly weary of setting up extraneous accounts for testing purposes), but this should give a picture of the range.

That's all the news for now! I will probably post again tomorrow, but after that I will be silent for a week as I travel to Maryland to visit family. Hooray! (And Astra Libris, this last line was just for you, my dear audience of 1!)

2 comments:

Astra Libris said...

Oh my, Libby, could we have possibly been in Maryland at the same time??!! Wishing we could have gotten together to catch up in person! :-)

You are so sweet to reference me in your posts - I'm honored! :-) I am so impressed with all your technological forays, too...

Thank you for reminding me about crock pot meals!! It was raining so hard on Monday, I took your advice and put up some black bean stew in the crockpot! The perfect work-night meal... :-) You rock!!

Libby said...

Oh, I'm glad that you were able to use the crockpot so quickly! I have to brainstorm to find ways to use it, but I'm usually quite happy when I do.

We didn't get to Maryland until Monday the 25th (we couldn't leave until the 24th when Mark finished his last week of working at his church music job for the summer), and since we were already going to miss Lisa's wedding, we decided to stop overnight in Charlottesville to visit another friend.

Sounds like nursing and cooking are both going well!