[Web4lib] IM reference time and trouble?

[Brian Gray]

My campus has installed and supports Spark. It allows us to have an
internal IM system for our campus, monitor all the external accounts,
and also have a meebome-like application on our website. We still do
schedule people since many IM accounts only alloow a single person to
be logged in, but we are all on the system all the time for the Spark
and questions from the website.

As a large percentage of our questions are access-related or do you
have this questions, an international service would not be good for
our campus.

Our philosophy of service is that we treat it similar to phone
reference. In other words, sometimes it needs to go to voice mail and
sometimes you need to tell a patron this question is not appropriate
for this communication channel.

Brian Gray
mindspiral at gmail.com


On Dec 20, 2007 4:19 AM, Dan Lester <dan at riverofdata.com> wrote:
> I guess I'm thinking of time and trouble to users, too.
>
> You have to schedule someone to be monitoring it.  It is only
> available certain hours (as opposed to the international 24/7
> systems). There is a limit to what can be conveyed via chat.