Countdown!

• facebook

There are a few unique challenges associated with trying to integrate a texting (SMS) service into an IM/chat reference workflow. Two of them are:

1. Attempting to keep responses relatively short. SMS tops out at 160 7-bit characters or 140 8-bit characters.
   
2. Training librarians to notice when they have an SMS patron in the first place.

Messages in excess of the character limits will be automatically split up into multiple messages, so going over the limit is not the end of the world, but SMS conversations flow more nicely if the librarian has an awareness of the limitations.

Eric just added a nifty feature to the webchat client to help out with patrons sending messages from cell phones.


When the librarian begins composing a message, a character countdown starting at 140 begins displaying in the top right corner of the window. You can also see from the normal routing information displayed in the top left corner that the patron is on a phone and contacted the pamq queue. If this wasn't a goofy test chat, you could have seen that they contacted your special reference queue, or your SMS queue, or whatever you've setup.

[edited to add: The webchat client automatically detects phone numbers and applies the countdown display only then. It will not display with routine chats and IMs.]

We're working on a new kind of SMS gateway, one that will let a patron text a phone number rather than using a short code like with the AIM hack. More news on that as it happens...