Action for Libraries
The Great TechScape — E-Reference: Doing It on the Fly and On the Cheap!
By Shelly Drumm
Not too long ago, I was on the phone trying to help a less-than-tech savvy friend who was having trouble navigating a Web site. As I was trying to talk her through the various hoops she had to jump through to accomplish what she was trying to do, I did what I often do in such situations — I took screenshots of the pages that were causing her confusion and, using my pricey Web graphics creation software, highlighted, circled and pointed to the bits on the screen she needed help with. I then uploaded that to my Web server and sent her a link. Perfect! Problem solved!
That got me to thinking about the different ways we provide reference service and the kinds of questions we get. More and more, we find ourselves walking our patrons through a complicated series of steps in an online environment. But most librarians don't have a fancy graphics tool or direct access to a Web server to handle this dilemma the way described above. Happily, there are loads of great tools to help us deliver reference service in this brave new web world. Some of our libraries may have access to those Cadillacs of electronic reference that allow patrons to ask questions online and to follow along on pages pushed to them by a librarian somewhere, 24/7. Many of our libraries, though, can't afford the Cadillac price tags that usually accompany those tools. Not only that, the bulky interfaces for some of those tools - while they are full-featured to be sure - often are discouraging to a generation of folks used to sleeker, faster tools.
If you've got one of those fancy systems for providing e-reference and are happy with it, great! For the rest of you, though, if you're interested in finding new and — that magic word - FREE ways to help your patrons online, read on. Below is a list of some of my favorite on-the-fly and on-the-cheap reference tools.
Instant Messaging, Meebo, and MeeboMe
Instant messaging (IM) is a great, quick way to share information. Many of our patrons are using one of the big 4 IM clients: AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), MSN/Hotmail Messenger, Google Talk or Yahoo! Messenger. To accommodate all of them, we need to have accounts at all four of those clients, as well. But of course, we don't want to have to log into and monitor four different accounts.
Enter Meebo. Meebo is a web-based (no installation required) IM account consolidator. Through it, you can monitor accounts at all of the big four messengers via one window. What's more, Meebo also offers what they call a MeeboMe widget (see the image from the MP Baker Library at Panola College in Carthage, Texas) that can be embedded on any Web page and that allows any visitor to your site to ask a question via IM, regardless of whether or not they are logged into, or even have, an IM account, right from your library's homepage.
Grab accounts at each of those big four, then head to www.meebo.com to get started.
Jing
WOW, I cannot believe this tool is free! I just discovered it and can't stop using it to illustrate just about anything I need to demo online to someone who's not in the same room. The way Jing works is simple. You install it on your machine, and when you have to share something with someone, you click on a yellow semicircle that floats unobtrusively at the top of your screen. You then tell Jing if you want to record a screencast (a quick movie of your actions on a Web site) or just take a screenshot (a static picture). Then you make your movie or take the picture. For static pics, you can then add notes, highlights, arrows and more. Movies can't be edited quite the same way, unfortunately.
Now, there are a lot of screencasting tools — some pretty pricy — and a lot of screenshot editing tools, as well. What Jing has that these don't is the ability to quickly and automatically share your screencasts or screen shots via the Web without requiring you to have server space or ftp access of your own. (Although with the new release, you can ftp to your own server or share your screenshots on flickr, too!) Once you've got your screenshot looking the way you want it to, you simply click "Share" and Jing will automatically save it to the Web, and, better yet — automatically copy the URL of the file to your clipboard. All you have to do is paste it into an email or IM. The whole thing can be done in a flash. Also, while I haven't tried it yet, apparently you can record voice narration onto the videos, as well. I can only imagine how much easier this is going to make explaining eBay to my mom (again)!
It's important to note that currently, Jing is free, but it's also in beta, and its creators, Techsmith, have some other great tools that they do charge for (SnagIt and Camtasia, most notably). What does the future hold for Jing? Who knows! But for now — it's great, and it's free!
Google Docs Presentations
If you've already put some effort into making PowerPoint presentations to handle some of your frequently asked questions or to help demonstrate some of the features of your Web site or the tools you offer, you're probably reluctant to recreate them entirely. And, especially if they're laden with screen captures, they're probably way too big to e-mail to your patrons. A great — and free — way to share PowerPoint presentations is incorporated into the Google Docs package. Google Docs will allow you, once you have a Google account, to upload a PowerPoint presentation, which it will then convert to a Web-friendly format for you, and you're ready to go. You can share your presentations with folks by email or just by sharing the link. Your patrons don't have to login, but if they do, you can then lead them through presentations, complete with a built-in messaging window. In fact, several people can log in at once, so you can share with groups, not just individuals.
Those are just a few, but they're my current faves. In the early days of the Web, real-time communication and multimedia content sharing was not for the faint of heart. Chatting required esoteric command line code knowledge, and sharing video content required software that was often expensive and not entirely intuitive, as well as the ability to upload files to the Web or e-mail accounts that could handle massive file sizes. Now, with the profusion of great, light-weight and low-tech-threshold applications available for free, all of this is available to you to use to provide more flexible services to your patrons. How will you use it?