Testing with a REAL person!

Today, for the first time, I was able to do some practice chats with someone ELSE on the other end of the chat. It went quite well! I first set up two of my fellow reference librarians with accounts, and then one of them and I practiced chatting back and forth. We both took a turn as the patron (using the handy-dandy, school spirited widget!), and also practiced sending files and web pages.

I hope to do some tests with someone off-campus at some point, because I want to see how accessing protected materials (i.e. databases) will go. Will the librarian be able to send a patron directly to an article? Will they have to describe the process of remote access (shivers run down my spine--it's already complex enough via phone!!)?

Also, I'd like to try to figure out if the librarian chat client has any allowances for increasing text size--we don't want to make all our librarians go blind!!

I've started systematically reading through the documentation on the Google Group, and that has been interesting and informative. Hopefully the time expended doing this will both prevent me from repeating questions and give me some background knowledge to apply as needed.

On an unrelated note, another piece of "technology" (really it's content, but quintessentially online) that I've decided I need to explore more is Wikipedia. I came across an awesome blog post about an assignment to write and follow a Wikipedia article that makes me realize how little I understand Wikipedia myself. It may take a few weeks to get around to looking at it, so I wanted to record the intention as a reminder to myself (I have to write down everything in order to remember it).