Queues and Routing!

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Recently, we released for testing one of the most unique components of libraryh3lp: Queues and Routing. This is where we begin to crack one of the tougher nuts in the library chat puzzle, that of one public identity being served by multiple librarians. Solving this problem begins to allow a library a lot of flexibility in their staffing model. Want to have librarians working in their individual offices, coming and going in shifts? No problem, and no worries over disconnects or interrupted patron chats at shift change time. Want to have two (or more) chat computers at a service desk, with incoming chats appearing on both, so that you can easily have two librarians handling the service? That works too, and only one of them will become actually connected to the patron. You can also have a whole gaggle of librarians, distributed around campus or elsewhere, simultaneously watching your service. They'll all see each incoming chat, but again, only one of them will wind up talking with the patron. The others will get a message that someone else took that chat, and they'll become disconnected from the patron.

Let's talk about how this might work to grow a chat service. Think of a Queue as a public entry point. Right now, you're probably just testing and experimenting, but some day, you might want a queue for Reference and one for Circulation. You might want one for each library, if you're in a big system. You might even some day want one for various areas of subject expertise, if you have several specialist librarians who will be online at various times during the day. Then, patrons could expect to connect immediately with an expert in their field (maybe you'll put a link to this queue in your more advanced subject guides).

But I digress. Let's walk through a basic setup. Our hypothetical situation will be for one library with a Reference and Circulation queue and several librarians.

How to set this up? Here is a conceptual overview:

1. Visit http://libraryh3lp.com/ and register for a new account. Think of this as your "admin" account.
2. Use this admin account to create your Queues: MyLibRef and MyLibCirc. Note that libraryh3lp will give you the URL for the queue, and you can use that to make your chat widget.
   
3. Now, create some users. These will be your librarian "operator" accounts. Let's hypothetically create sally-mylib, ed-mylib, jane-mylib, and eric-mylib.
4. You need to assign your users to their queues. Sally and Ed are reference librarians, so you'll assign them to the MyLibRef queue. Jane and Eric work in circulation, so you'll assign them to MyLibCirc. Sally is cross-trained to work in circulation, so you'll also assign her to MyLibCirc in addition to MyLibRef.
5. Note that when you're creating these accounts, libraryh3lp is offering randomly-generated passwords, but you don't have to accept them. You can fill in whatever password you would like. Operators can change their passwords using their Jabber client; later, they'll also be able to change their passwords through the web administration tool.
   
6. You'll probably want to spend some time working on your web chat widget and figuring out what you want to do with your Presence. The queues will assume offline presence if there are no associated librarians online. You could hide your chat widget entirely when offline, or you could have it offer an e-mail form, or whatever you'd like. In our example, if Sally is the only librarian online, both the MyLibRef and MyLibCirc queues will appear online. If only Jane is online, MyLibCirc will appear online and MyLibRef will appear offline.
   
7. Your librarians will need to sign into their accounts with a suitable Jabber client, and you'll want to spend some time making sure you get it set up as best suits your needs. Pay particular attention to how it is set for Away status. If your librarians are signed in, but keyboard inactivity is making them appear Away, your patrons will see whatever you have setup for your offline presence.

Note about naming your queues and users: Libraryh3lp has typing notification built-in everywhere, and so the names do, in fact, matter a bit, since patrons will see them. For a queue, the patron will see "queue-name is typing," regardless of what librarian operator is actually working on the chat. For an individual's chat widget, the patron will see the individual's account name. So, it might be nicer for your patron to see typing notification from something like MyLibRef or pam-mylib than queue1 or user23. Your individual librarian account names will not really matter unless you plan to actually have entry points for individuals (as opposed to queues) in your system. For instance, perhaps your librarians will have their own staff pages, and they might want their own personal, non-queue, widget there, and having something recognizable in the typing notification is a nice touch. As an aside, the chat widget on this blog page is a queue that Eric and I both monitor, and its Presence is available if either one or both of us are online. If we are both online, we'll both see your message, but only the first one to type will be connected with you.

Another note that becomes important during testing: each patron can have only one active libraryh3lp widget chat per browser instance, even if using different queues. For this reason, if you wish to simulate more than one patron, use separate browsers (such as Firefox and IE) on one computer, or use multiple computers and multiple browsers to simulate many patrons. This is an HTTP restriction that Eric has explained to me repeatedly, and I can only nod my head. Librarian operators can have multiple patrons.

That's it in a nutshell. The wiki has a lot more detail. The administration interface, as you'll see, is very basic and bare bones right now. That will get fancier in the future. Currently, we are not storing any transcripts, but it will be possible to opt into that in the future.

Next major development milestone: gateways for external IM networks, like AIM. Coming soon. We're already running test gateways internally and will release this for public testing within two weeks.