Promoting Your Library through Pinterest

If you are a librarian and haven't yet heard of Pinterest, it's definitely worth a look, especially if your library is into leveraging social media to promote library services. Pinterest is a social networking site that lets users create groupings (pinboards) of images (pins) they find on the web or upload. Users can then interact with other people's pins and pinboards by "like"ing pins or by following pinboards.

If you have already heard of Pinterest, it is probably because the site is making big news lately on the Interwebs. According to comScore, Pinterest was the fastest growing independent site to hit 10 million monthly unique visits in the U.S. Another report claims that Pinterest drives more referral traffic to online retailers than Google+, YouTube, Reddit and LinkedIn combined.

By default, each pin is linked back to the website from whence it came. BUT, you can easily edit the pin's link and change it to wherever you'd like. The ability to customize pin links unlocks all sorts of exciting possibilities for promoting your library's collections, services, and events. For example, libraries could upload images of newly arrived books and then link those images directly to its catalog record. That is, when a patron clicks on the pin for a book, she could be directed to a page that makes it easy for her to hold or check out a copy. You could post items promoting an upcoming event and then post pictures from the event after it was done. And you could even pin an image of your chat widget, linked to your Ask-A-Librarian page, so that people with questions can get connected to your staff more easily.

Libraries are already jumping on the Pinterest band wagon. Here are just a few examples:

• University of Louisville Libraries currently has 5 boards, including Books, Videos, and Photographs.
• Westerville Library in Westerville, Ohio currently has 16 boards, including Bookish Crafts, Quotes About Reading, and Tweens/Teens Library Love.
• Clermont County Public Library in Ohio current has 42 boards! They cover topics like staff pick books for a variety of age groups and genres, new books each month, and Going Green Books.

If you are interested in looking into Pinterest for your library, Anne Clarke, who is a Children's Librarian in Michigan, recently published a really nice blog post entitled Pinterest for Librarians. Pinterest Online Curation Pinboard with Major Promise for Libraries, written by Joe Murphy, is another good resource. Pinterest is currently in a beta phase. So you'll need an invite to get an account. You can request an invite via Pinterest's website or e-mail us and we can send you an invite through our Pinterest account. Yes, LibraryH3lp is giving Pinterest a whirl!

If you've spent any time with the widget designer in the admin site, you probably have come across the shared widget skins. As it stands, the shared skins is a long list of widgets that our libraries have created over the years. Its length is both a blessing and curse. You have lots of opportunity for inspiration, but then any enthusiasm quickly gets tempered by the sheer magnitude. Enter Pinterest.

We're creating a visual library of widgets and Ask-A-Librarian images intended to inspire and to encourage creativity when integrating chat widgets into websites. Eventually, we'd like to integrate these boards into our website. We've seeded the two boards with some examples (all linked directly to the originating library's Ask-A-Librarian service), but we'd love to have many more! As a testament to Pinterest's active user population, we're already getting followers and likes on our pins. If you would like to add your chat widget and/or Ask-A-Librarian image to our boards, please let us know. And if you'd prefer us not to use your images, also let us know and we will remove them from our boards.

Updated admin site and webchat client coming soon!

Just a quick heads-up that we'll be updating the admin site and webchat client in the next couple of weeks. We'll give an exact date when we're a little closer, but we wanted to give you a quick preview of all the improvements to come.

The updated admin site's new layout significantly improves management of large admin domains with lots of users and queues. We're also rearranging the ordering of the tabs so that common activities are most prominent. For example, the default start page will be "Activity" rather than "Users, Queues, and Gateways" so you can see what is going on with your chat service as soon as you log in. This makes more sense in the scheme of daily admin activities and should streamline your workflow. We are also improving time zone support. No more off-by-an-hour daylight savings time effects, and you'll have the ability to set your local time zone. Plus, we've added snazzy interactive reports where you can modify the graphs by clicking on the legends.

The changes to the webchat client are less user-visible, facilitating an easy transition for your staff to the updated version. Initially, the most noticeable change will be easier navigation to Monitor Activity.

These upgrades pave the way for exciting (and frequently requested) features, such as canned messages and the ability to centrally block abusive patrons. These new features will not be exposed in the new versions immediately, but they will be implemented as soon as possible after the first phase of changes. Under the hood, these updates represent modernization to the JavaScript libraries and pave the way for access control lists (ACLs), which will provide more fine-grained control over user permissions.

Here is a screencast that provides a quick (less than 4 minutes!) overview of the updated admin site on our sister product, My Customer Cloud. This screencast was for the first public version of the updated admin site; we're adding a few more features to this version before we roll it out to LibraryH3lp.

Some users may quite logically wonder if it's possible to test out the updated versions before they go live, or for us to provide the current versions and new versions simultaneously for a period of transition time. Unfortunately, the ACL support requires API changes that are incompatible with the previous interfaces, and so this simply isn't possible. However, we hope that our updated documentation and screencasts will help ease any growing pains.

We'll be sure to post an update once we're closer to releasing the changes.

Birthday wish granted! We haz Wordle.

A big THANK YOU to everyone who granted our birthday wish! The Wordle of LibraryH3lp customers is now in place on the LibraryH3lp home page.

We gave greater font sizes to those customers who have been with LibraryH3p the longest because we sincerely appreciate the courage of our early adopters. And, without further ado, our Wordle:

Please let us know of any typos. And if you would like to add your library to our Wordle, just let us know. We have plenty of room. :-)

New commands for patrons texting your Twilio SMS gateway

We've added two texting commands that give your patrons control over text messages sent from your Twilio number.

When a patron texts "stop", "quit", or "end" to your Twilio number, she will no longer receive any incoming text messages from your librarians. As confirmation, she will receive a notice that the stop command was successful. These words will have no effect if they are simply part of a larger text message. That is, "When will this rain stop?" will go through just fine.

To counteract a previously issued "stop" command, a patron can text "start" to your Twilio number. She will again be able to receive incoming text messages from your librarians. As confirmation, she will receive a notice that the start command was successful.

These commands are in keeping with best practice guidelines from the MMA.

P.S. Thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes last Friday! It really made our week! And, if your library wants to be featured in our Wordle, there's still plenty of time to be included.

Guess what? We're four years old today!

Today is LibraryH3lp's birthday! We don't typically spend much time on this blog talking about ourselves, but this feels like a good time to do just that. We also have one favor to ask of you (think of it is a birthday wish), but that can wait until the very end of this post.

Four years ago today, we issued a call for testers and described our basic goals regarding features. A year later, we announced that the system was self-sufficient, in that it was making enough money to cover basic hosting costs, although programming time was mostly still donated by Eric. Eric was still doing a lot of separate contract programming in those days, with LibraryH3lp as an interesting side project.

Four years later, we're still going strong and still growing. At this point, the care and feeding of LibraryH3lp involves full-time work by three people. It is Eric's main project now. Amy Shelton, programmer and support guru extraordinaire, joined up full-time in May 2011. Pam left her full-time librarian job at UNC-Chapel Hill at the end of December, 2011, in order to focus more fully on LibraryH3lp.

Today, over 300 universities and colleges, public libraries, special libraries, and various combinations thereof pay for subscriptions (thank you!). The state-wide NCknows service migrated fully onto LibraryH3lp, including backup staff, in the summer of 2011. We have servers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia. System architecture has been revised to support heavy usage and growth capacity.

The code is being continually improved. While the whole system is not open source, we have released parts of the system as 10 different open source projects and contributed to over a dozen more. We plan to talk more about our open source work later.

In October 2011, one of our busiest months, there were 67,958 chats of at least 30 seconds duration on the US server. In the last 24 hours, we processed about 25.5 million presence requests from over 200,000 unique IP addresses; a presence request happens each time someone loads a web page with a LibraryH3lp widget or presence badge. Those numbers (presence requests from unique IPs) are a good indication that people are out there using your library websites very heavily, even on a cold day in January. Also in the last 24 hours, there were about a quarter million messages (individual lines of chat) sent back and forth.

What is the secret to our success? Our loyal customers! We know there are several choices for virtual reference chat out there. So we sincerely appreciate the business of each of our customers. On this fourth birthday, we'd like to thank each of our customers for making LibraryH3lp a success and for trusting us to provide the infrastructure for your library's service.

Now about that one birthday wish. We have never published a list of customers on our website, because that seems like a kind of rude thing to do without permission, even though it's done all the time in the technology field. Instead we have usually referred those who ask to the Library Success Wiki. However, we'd really love to put a Wordle composed of current LibraryH3lp libraries on our web site. People really do ask, and we think it would look nifty.

If you'd like to add your library to our Wordle, please either comment here, tweet us, or shoot us an email at support@libraryh3lp.com.

Thanks, everyone!

Eric, Pam, and Amy

Fancy follow-me widget behavior with some JavaScript

For those of you using follow-me widgets, we'd like to share a nifty trick where you can use an image of a chat widget to initiate the follow-me behavior and then hide the chat widget image while the patron is using the follow-me widget. First, we'll show you the trick in action. Then we'll lift the hood and show how you can do it too!

Our example comes courtesy of Danielle Theiss from Rockhurst University's Greenlease Library and Jessica Hammond from the Mobius Consortium. Many thanks to them for letting us share their work with you! If the video below doesn't show up properly, you can also view it here.





If you'd like to try out their page out for yourself, follow this link to the Mobius search page.

Now, let's lift the hood and see how it works.

The first thing you'll want to do is to wrap the div containing your chat widget image within another div and give that div a distinctive id. Here is an example of what to do assuming you are using the output from our updated widget designer and using an id of "chat-widget".
<div id="chat-widget"> <div class="needs-js"> You need to enable JavaScript in your browser to chat with us. </div> </div>
Then you'll need to add a bit of JavaScript as close to the end of your BODY as possible.
<script type="text/javascript"> var id = 'chat-widget'; try { if (window.parent.location.href === undefined) { document.getElementById(id).style.display = 'none'; } else { document.getElementById(id).style.display = ''; } } catch (err) { document.getElementById(id).style.display = 'none'; } </script>
For those interested in the technical details... The if statement is to handle Chrome. The exception handling takes care of Firefox and IE. Seems to work fine for latest versions of Opera, SeaMonkey, and Camino too. Please let us know if you find a case that isn't handled.

That should do the trick. Have your own tips and tricks for follow-me widgets? Please share them in the comments below. :-)

Updates to Twilio SMS gateway pricing

Beginning February 1, 2012, two things will be happening with regard to Twilio SMS gateway billing.

First, we'll start assessing all existing Twilio numbers a $1/month charge. We've always said that we charge $1/month for Twilio numbers, but actually haven't up until this point. If you acquired a Twilio number prior to February 1, 2012, we will start deducting $1/month for use of that number beginning on February 1. We will be in touch via e-mail with our individual customers this week about their current Twilio SMS balance.

The bigger change to billing only affects numbers acquired on or after February 1, 2012. Any Twilio number acquired on or after February 1, 2012 will be assessed at $2/month. This modest price increase helps cover our administration costs.

The price of incoming or outgoing SMS remains the same at $0.03 per message.

These prices are good for both U.S. and Canada numbers. To date, Twilio has kept prices for Canadian numbers stable and the same as U.S. numbers. Yay!

If you are considering adding a Twilio SMS gateway to your account, please have us acquire your number before February 1, 2012 so that you'll be grandfathered into the $1/month phone charge. To set one up, e-mail us:

• your top-level admin name
• the queue on which you'd like to add the gateway
• the desired area code for the number
• (optional) a number to which to forward any voice calls
• (optional) a custom offline message that is 140 characters or less

If you have a Twilio SMS gateway that you no longer want for whatever reason, please let us know.