Introduction

In the summer of 2007, libraries at UNC, Duke, and NCSU deployed a collaborative instant-messaging system---Pidgin4Lib---for the 2007-2008 school year. Experiences with that system have been mixed, and LibraryH3lp is the next evolution of the idea.

Details

Libraries have long offered collaborative web-based chat services through a variety of systems, including e-commerce help desk packages and virtual reference packages targeted at libraries specifically. These systems allow libraries to present patrons with one web-based entry point into a chat system, and the system joins them with one of any number of librarians. In the early 2000's, many libraries began offering very successful IM services by advertising buddy names registed with IM networks such as AIM, Yahoo!, etc. While these IM services have generally been very popular, technical limitations have prevented them from scaling to include collaborative services, where multiple librarians receive messages sent to one public identity.

UNC, Duke, and NCSU began offering a night-time collaborative web-based chat service (without IM because of the inherent limitations) in 2003. During the day, each school ran its service for its own patrons separately. At the same time, all of the schools were also developing successful IM services that operated during the day, only. The original Pidgin4Lib system was created to allow these libraries to offer their IM services through the night-time collaboration, using the same buddy names their users already knew about. For example, on Monday night, NCSU would be in charge of providing the service for all three schools. A UNC patron IMing the UNC library during this time would seamlessly be routed to the NCSU librarian monitoring the service.

This original Pidgin4Lib system was designed as a peer-to-peer network. The motivation behind this choice was that it should be easy to setup and not require specialized servers that would need a lot of IT support. The system generally worked well, but it was confusing to initially setup and configure. There were also some limitations and bugs: blocking abusive patrons was problematic, file transfer was very buggy, and librarian "operators" had no way of knowing when patrons coming in through Meebo Me widgets had left the chat. The peer-to-peer nature of the software also meant that rolling out updates and bug fixes would be cumbersome and require someone to touch each computer used to offer the service.

While the three institutions involved have successfully been using the peer-to-peer system for many months, it quickly became obvious that anyone who wasn't involved in the development of the software would have little hope of being able to deploy it without extensive help. Additionaly, the peer-to-peer nature of the system created an infrastructure that meant updates would need to be done on a lot of individual PCs, which is very problematic. It was decided that "version 2" would necessarily be a hosted service with centralized administrative features. That's LibraryH3lp.