We're One Year Old Today!

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Today marks LibraryH3lp's first birthday, as measured from the start of this blog, which announced our intentions with the system and asked for testers. It's been a fantastic, if busy year, and a number of exciting things have come to pass. Besides adding lots of features mentioned elsewhere in the blog, there are a few other things worth mentioning.

• Self-sufficiency. When we started, we knew we didn't want to have advertisements or data mining in order to generate revenue to pay for hosting; there was no grant source, venture capital, or investor other than Eric's small business. That left us with the idea of a nominal subscription fee, since we could not afford to fund LibraryH3lp out of pocket indefinitely. A number of our busiest libraries have already stepped up and contributed with their subscription (thank you!). At this point, the system's current hosting fees are covered. Now, programming time is still mostly donated, with a very exciting exception in the form of...

• Support from the state of North Carolina towards development of features needed by larger collaborative services. That's right, NC is funding some actual feature development (i.e., programming time), which is very much appreciated. So far, the main thing to show for this is the librarians' webchat client. More reports, tag-for-followup, profile pages, and access-control lists are among funded features still to come. North Carolina, our home state, has always been good to us. After all, it was the freedom to experiment with, and the technical challenges involved in, chat and IM services at Duke University, North Carolina State University, and UNC-Chapel Hill that led to the development of LibraryH3lp in the first place.
  

• It's just working. Knock on wood, the system has been pleasantly stable and generally operates at very low load. We've had less than five minutes of downtime in the last three months. LibraryH3lp was engineered from the ground up for scalability and stability, and this has paid off.

• Our first corporate partnership. Altarama's RefChatter product remains available for those who require professional support, setup, and training. Options are good.

But perhaps the most exciting thing for us has been witnessing the rate of adoption and the subsequent high use the system is receiving. At the peak of the Fall academic semester last October and November, there were about 600 chats and IMs on queues and probably about the same number in direct chats each day. We love to see that the system is getting put to good use.

One small request: if you're using LibraryH3lp, please consider listing your library in the Library Success Wiki. We occasionally are asked for a list of users, and because of our views on privacy, we don't share this information, but we love being able to point folks who ask to a user-generated list.

Thank you for your support, and we look forward to this year!