Logging chat sessions

[Stacy Pober]

After muttering that I had never seen a scholarly use of chat and 
deleting the chat clients from the public area computers, one of the 
instructors here has given his classes an assignment to interview 
someone using Internet chat.

Okay, so we finally we have a use for chat.  The problem is that the 
instructor specifically encouraged the students to use Yahoo's chat, 
and log their session to disk for later transcription.    The chat 
sessions are easy enough to arrange (we use the "html" option at the 
Yahoo chat site).  However, I have been unable to find a way to save  
these sessions.  There doesn't seem to be an onscreen menu item or 
icon for logging to disk.  The Yahoo chat occurs within a frame, and 
saving the frames one by one as the text in the window scrolls up is 
tedious and impractical.  

Is there a way to log Yahoo chat sessions to disk?  If not, do we 
have to use an alternative chat program such as mIRC?  (and can that 
connect to Yahoo?)

The assignment is to interview a "baby boomer" and Yahoo has specific 
age-group chat rooms.  One student worked around the logging problem 
by meeting her boomer in the room and then arranging to do the 
interview by email.   Since the instructor clearly wanted to 
encourage live chat sessions, this didn't really solve the problem.

Suggestions?

Stacy Pober
Information Alchemist 
Manhattan College Libraries
spober at manhattan.edu
spober at manvax.cc.manhattan.edu