The best advantage of using IM is getting answers quickly! The biggest disadvantage is when no one in your address book is online to respond! /:
I used IM a couple of years ago when my son & his wife were getting married. They live in Omaha & I live in Red Cloud. When it got down to making final decisions and they were on the phone with the wedding planner, he could instant message me & ask my opinion.
As I librarian, I could see where this may be helpful to patrons needing quick answers about
anything! But it could also take up alot of a librarian's time answering those questions and the
patron(s) may get impatient waiting for an answer if the librarian is doing other things.
posted by NancyS @ 12:21 PM
1 Comments
1 Comments:
Hi NancySOS! Sounds like you have already experiences some of the benefits of IM!
You are certainly right that it is an additional communications mechanism for librarians to balance, and that there is always a concern that the patron waiting for an IM response might get impatient.
One way our reference desk staff handles this is by trying to respond to the initial IM "ping" as quickly as possible. As long as people know you are there and working on their question they are usually ok with a bit of a wait, because they can be multi-tasking. They might be chatting with a friend while they are waiting for your answer, or continuing to search the web or work on a paper.
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