Our Text-a-Librarian service has just improved, significantly!  We now have our own phone number, courtesy of Google Voice, where patrons can text us directly with questions.  This is tied into Libraryh3lp, so any questions that are sent will go directly to Libraryh3lp where the person taking IM questions can also answer the text questions.

A couple of points:

To know whether someone is contacting us via text, look at the “from” in Pidgin.  The greyed out section is the incoming phone number, and you’ll notice that it says “textalibrarian” and “voice” (meaning, Google Voice).

Both library queues will be getting the text questions, so if you see one come in, go ahead and claim it if you can answer it.  Any questions that come in when no one is online will appear when the next person logs in.

Our new text number is 918-DREXEL1.  Give it a try!

Friday I gave a presentation at the Western New York Library Resource Council‘s conference, Revved up for Reference: Virtual Reference in New York State. It was held in Ithaca, NY, and had about 50 attendees for the full event.

I spoke on Drexel’s implementation of Libraryh3lp, and my slides (pdf) are posted here, along with the other presenters’ slides, and photos of the event on the conference website.

My talk featured some statistical charts from LibraryH3lp –here’s the amount of IM traffic to the widget on the library home page, by month.

Jan-Sept 23, 2009

Here’s a chart of IMs we get, by time of day, and day of the week.

If you’d like to see more of these stats, please leave a comment, or just send me an email.