Presentation given on 3/17/2010 to the Library Technology Conference at Macalester College in Minnesota.

1. I'm Not Here I'm There: Using a Local Instant Messenger Server in your Library John Fink Digital Technologies Development Librarian McMaster University http://twitter.com/adr http://claimid.com/adr [email_address]

2. An apology...

3. Who am I?

4. Who are you?

5. Why did I do this?

6. A brief primer on our blended service.

8. Then suddenly, I didn't have reference anymore

9. So I could...

10. ...hang around the reference desk stalking people

11. ...hide in the machine room, coming out occasionally to get coffee

12. ...despair of ever dealing with the public again.

13. Because if we're taken out of the public sphere, and especially out of reference, we will atrophy . We don't know what patrons are looking for, and we may not be up on the search methods, databases, etc that they're using.

14. When I was on the desk 10-20 hours a week, I felt energized.

16. Email, telephones, newsletters, forums – these are all ok, but nothing really replaces walking by someone's office and going ”Hey, look at this neat thing, you got five minutes?”

17. This is made way worse if you have multiple branches.

19. ...we need synchronous as well as asynchronous communications methods.

20. When I was a young sysadmin, I felt that – maybe even more than http – email was the one service that had to be up.

21. Now I think that about IM services.

22. Tackling a social problem with a technical solution.

24. ...blah blah blah...

25. ...dedicated reference services by librarians will, by all measure, get less prevalent instead of more prevalent.

26. ...I'm a librarian, and I think this mostly sucks.

28. ...or set office hours?

29. ...or a hosted IM solution (libraryh3lp, etc)

30. ...or a ”consumer grade” IM solution (gtalk, AIM, etc.)

31. DO NOT WANT

32. NOOOOO

34. ...using standard IM is not ideal because

35. ...we want to foster a sense of community

36. ...we want to make it easy enough for all staff to take part

37. ...we want an in-house solution, for security and convenience.

38. ...we've heard horror stories about libraryh3lp.

40. ...or at least doesn't do easily .

41. ...like have all users join a single group

42. ...so they can see and be seen by everybody else

43. ...and maybe more importantly

44. … so they can all talk together.

46. ...standards compliant.

47. ...usable with cross platform clients.

48. ...open source.

49. ...simple to implement.

50. ...simple to use.

51. ...local.

52. Openfire

54. ... Java?

55. XMPP/Jabber so...

56. ...works with Pidgin/Adium/<insert multiprotocol client here>

57. ...can run on commodity hardware.

58. ..no seriously Java!

60. And hey presto!

62. ...original box a five year old Dell

63. ...one gb of RAM

64. ...teeny tiny hard drive.

65. …on its last legs.

66. A plea for the cloud...

68. ...but we've used it for

69. ...quick polling

70. ...general ”socializing”

71. ...system outages

72. ...probably lots of other stuff I don't see. And that's fine!

74. XMPP is a standard, but not everyone implements it well (problems exist in Adium that don't in Pidgin, even though both are libpurple based)

75. For it to really work well, you need outside net access.

76. This is not always trivial.

78. Right now, due to our (now departed) access services head we've got most blended services paraprofessionals but...

79. ...usage is not compulsory.

80. ...so we us ually see the same 10-15 users.

81. ...and librarian involvement is not exactly where I'd like it.

82. Got time for a demo?

83. Any questions?