Week 8 – Time to Chat, part 1

Well, we’ve made it to week 8, having been through a lot of different tools and ideas so far, so here is another weekly post. Chat programs have been around for years now, and there are different tools and different interfaces that we can choose from. The one that we’re going to work with is, not surprisingly GTalk from Google. I chose this one for two primary reasons. First, we all have Google addresses from the Blogger/Gmail trials we have already done. Second, and probably more important, we’re probably going to be moving the Chat Reference service over to GTalk in the near future, so if we’re going to take a look at one of these tools, and spend some time getting used to it, it’s probably the best solution.

There are two primary uses for a chat program in our Library. One of them is for external communication, like the Chat Reference that we’re already doing. The main benefit of GTalk in this area is that we can create a direct chat function on the web page that doesn’t require the student to have to download software or even a Google account in order to chat with us. That’s a project that we’ve been looking into.

The other primary use is for internal communications. I’ve been in libraries where everyone was logged into a chat program for most of the day, just marking themselves away when they left their desk, or turning the program off when they needed to really concentrate on something without any interruption. While we already have a lot of possible tools for internal communication, from phones to email to walking, chat is another possible tool, and so we’ll take a shot to see how useful it might be for us. If you think of it as a sort of email lite, you may get an idea of how it might be useful.

If all else fails, it will give us a chance to practice with the idea of using a tool to chat, among ourselves, and will also allow us to prepare for using GTalk as a tool to talk to the outside world. That does bring up one of the downfalls of chat-based program use in a work setting, though, and that probably should be mentioned here. It’s pretty easy to find yourself in a situation where chat extends beyond the work place, and begins to consume more time than any of us would want. I hope that we can avoid that particular issue, but we do have to be aware of it.

More follows on Friday, about how we’ll want to proceed with this test, and the different ways that we can move forward with the Week 8 trials!
jjs