libraryh3lp

Promoting Your Library through Pinterest

2012-02-15T15:18:00.000-05:00

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!

2012-02-13T13:33:00.001-05:00

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.

2012-02-01T20:27:00.005-05:00

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

2012-01-24T07:53:00.000-05:00

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!

2012-01-20T11:56:00.000-05:00

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

2012-01-19T07:37:00.000-05:00

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

2012-01-17T07:55:00.000-05:00

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.

New! Custom offline messages for Twilio SMS gateways

2012-01-08T13:11:00.005-05:00

Big news! We just updated our Twilio SMS gateway on the main US server to deliver messages sent when your queue is offline. And you can now customize the "we're offline" message a patron receives when texting to an offline queue.

Offline message delivery works like this. When a librarian brings the queue online, the librarian will receive any messages texted to your phone number while the queue was offline. The librarian will also receive system-generated metadata that states how long ago, in hours and minutes, the patron's message was sent. The messages will appear as a regular chat, allowing the librarian to get back in touch with the patron instantly.

Also, by popular request, each Twilio phone number can have its own customized "we're offline" message. Librarians have often wanted to provide their hours or a link to their service hours page, for instance, so the patron will have some idea of when to expect a reply.

If you'd like to customize the "we're offline" message for your Twilio phone number(s), please email your phone number(s) and the exact wording of your offline message to support@libraryh3lp.com.

Staffing queues on-the-go from your favorite mobile device

2011-12-20T22:01:00.002-05:00

Did you know that you can chat your LibraryH3lp (and My Customer Cloud) queues on-the-go? In fact, you can staff your queues from any mobile device that supports Jabber/XMPP IM client applications.

When staffing your queues on a mobile device, you'll definitely want to use a 3rd party Jabber/XMPP IM client rather than the webchat client. One drawback of the webchat client on iOS devices (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch) is that the sound notification will not work. But the primary reason to prefer IM clients over webchat on mobile devices is push notifications. Push notifications will ensure that you easily know when there is an incoming chat from a patron, even if your device is locked or you are using another app. For instance, if you are helping someone with research during a chat, you will probably need to switch to a web browser, and with push notifications, you'll get proactively notified when your patron sends you a new message.

There are tons of IM client options out there - IM+, BeeJive, and Process One to name a few. In this post, we'll focus on IM+. There are two primary reasons why we tend to recommend IM+. The first reason is that it has both free and paid versions. The free version has ads and times you out after 2 hours. The pro version has no ads and lets you stay logged in for up to 7 days. The nice thing about having free and paid versions is that you can try out the free version now and later upgrade to the pro if you want to. The second reason is that IM+ is available over a variety of mobile platforms.

Configuring IM+ to chat your LibraryH3lp (or My Customer Cloud) queues:

service = Jabber
login = your_username@libraryh3lp.com
password is your LibraryH3lp password
host = libraryh3lp.com
port = 5223
use old-style SSL = on

For My Customer Cloud users, you'll just replace libraryh3lp everywhere above with mycustomercloud.

As far as IM+ settings go, you'll want to make sure that you have push notifications turned on. That way you'll be notified of incoming chats from patrons. Play around a bit. IM+ has various settings you can customize for push notifications, including sounds, alerts, and badges.

If you have experience with another mobile IM client that you'd like to recommend, please add a comment to this post and share your thoughts with other LibraryH3lp users. :-)

Twilio SMS gateway update - Canadian numbers now available!

2011-12-14T18:00:00.003-05:00

We've got fantastic news for Canadian libraries using LibraryH3lp or My Customer Cloud! Twilio just approved us for their Canada SMS Beta service. This means that we are now able to offer Canadian phone numbers as part of our Twilio SMS gateway.

Please be aware that this service through Twilio is still in beta testing. If you'd like to give it a try, please email us and let us know:

the desired area code/city/province
the queue on which to install the gateway
your library's top-level admin name.
(optional) a number to forward regular voice calls to (usually reference or circulation desk number)

We'll handle all of the setup for you. You do not need to do anything directly with Twilio.

We'll front you a $10 credit so that you can test out the Twilio SMS gateway. If you decide to adopt the Twilio SMS gateway for production use, pricing for Canadian numbers and usage is currently the same as our US phone number pricing. We'll let you know if Twilio determines during the beta that a slightly higher rate is needed to ensure stability for Canadian numbers.

Please do not pay Twilio directly! Use our payments page instead.

Our Twilio SMS gateways feature:

A phone number for your patrons to text.
Nearly instant message delivery. No polling interval.
Automatic notification to the patron when the library is offline.
Coming soon: Offline messages are delivered the next time your queue comes online.
Not free, but very affordable. And of course, it integrates into LibraryH3lp like all our other gateways.
Text messages can be transferred to other librarians, transcripts stored, statistics gathered, etc...

A tour of the new Customer Dashboard

2011-11-28T15:01:00.005-05:00

Hi everyone! If you've visited our website lately, you noticed that we have a new look. After upgrading our software, rolling out new regional servers, and creating a new widget designer, it only seemed natural to give the website a facelift too.

As part of the facelift, we're very excited to announce the Customer Dashboard. The purpose of the Customer Dashboard is to collect everything you need to succeed with LibraryH3lp in one place. The Customer Dashboard currently has three major components: Quick Links, Getting Started, and Support. Let's quickly tour each.

The Quick Links section contains hyperlinks to resources that you regularly use with LibraryH3lp. They are:

Admin site - Use the admin site to manage your service (creating other users, creating queues, designing widgets, monitoring system activity, running reports).
Webchat client - A web-based chat client used to chat your queues.
System status - This is the system status page from our old website. We received a lot of positive feedback on it, so we kept it! The System Status Dashboard gives you an at-a-glance picture of the status of various system components.
Payments page - Where you can purchase/renew your annual LibraryH3lp subscription and/or purchase Twilio text messages.
Comprehensive Documentation - Everything your ever wanted to know about LibraryH3lp and more!

The Getting Started section links to a collection of screencasts oriented toward getting new users up and running with the admin site and the webchat client.

The Support section links to resources you can use to get LibraryH3lp support including our Google Group.

The Customer Dashboard is a work in progress. We've seeded it with some things that we think that you'll find useful. But you need to tell us what you actually find to be useful. The Customer Dashboard is for you. Send feedback to support@libraryh3lp.com and we'll fold your ideas on how to make the dashboard better back into the page for everyone. Suggest new content. Generate new sections. Replace sections with something more awesome. Go crazy!

New feature: queue buddying

2011-10-23T19:56:00.008-04:00

Have you ever wanted your staff to be able to see the presence for all the Libraryh3lp queues in your service at a glance? Or, have you ever wanted to be able to directly message a queue internally, from your buddy list?

Enter queue buddying!

With your queues buddied, your staff can easily see the status of the queues across your entire service right in their buddy list, regardless of the chat client they use. And, they can IM those queues directly. This may be a handy way to check to make sure another queue is able to receive a transfer.

How to enable queue buddies

Queue buddying is integrated with Auto-Buddy in the admin site.

If you want to buddy ALL staff with ALL queues, the easiest way is to follow these steps:

Sign into the admin site as your true top-level admin.
View your users and queues in Tree View.
Click Auto-Buddy.
Buddy your queues.
Say "yes" when prompted about Deep Buddy, which will flow down through any layers of hierarchy you have.

If someone chats a queue on which they are the only one available, they will receive back message not received.

More info:

About Auto-Buddy
About Hierarachy
About Tree View

Updated widget designer

2011-07-25T19:42:00.003-04:00

Quick note about a few new screencasts to go over the latest changes to the widget designer:

Updated widget designer part 1:

Part 1: Basic overview and embedded widgets

Updated widget designer part 2:

Part 2: Central code storage; pop-up widgets

Updated widget designer part 3:

Part 3: Follow-me widgets

(The end of Part 3 references a screencast about service rollover, but that is not updated yet. The earlier version is accurate except that it shows older-style code. The concepts are still very sound: service rollover screencast)

New libraryh3lp admins will find these useful, and experienced admins may find them helpful too, especially Part 2.

Soon, we hope to have a screencast for experienced admins that will succinctly describe the key changes in the widget designer and resulting code, which looks pretty different now than it did before. But for now, here are a few points:

Your existing code should be backwards compatible, so you don't need to change anything.
The new javascript method (no longer libraryh3lp.js?multi, although that still works fine) is more robust in various failure scenarios, in terms of network problems and such not creating problems with your larger web page.
The biggie: all of your chat code (not just things like widget skins) can be centrally stored in the libraryh3lp admin site now, if you want to do so. This is especially helpful for those who do not have access to edit the web pages housing all of their chat widgets. You can update your code on the admin site now, once you have the new-style code in place.
The key new part of the javascript looks like this: "libraryh3lp.com/js/libraryh3lp.js?xxx" where xxx is a number that references your chat code snippet.

Again, hopefully we'll have a screencast for experienced admins about the changes soon. Stay tuned!

Canadian Servers Now Available

2011-07-17T20:34:00.004-04:00

For LibraryH3lp:

support@libraryh3lp.com Please include your affiliation and preferred admin username.

Or RefChatter:

info@altarama.com

New Signups, New Servers

2011-07-11T21:11:00.017-04:00

At the risk of boring you, I'm going to start with a bit of LibraryH3lp history. Those of you who have been with us a long time will remember that during the first two years of LibraryH3lp we introduced new features on a regular basis. The third year... not so much. During the third year, we were pretty well occupied with managing ever-increasing load. Eventually we put a temporary hold on new registrations altogether, pending a very large upgrade.

Because the required upgrades and architectural changes were necessarily disruptive, we decided to wait until summer, when the work would cause the least damage. Those upgrades went about as well as expected, though admittedly not as well as hoped, but the heavy lifting is behind us now¹ and we're ready to move forward again. Unfortunately, we have no "I survived the LibraryH3lp upgrade and didn't even get a lousy T-shirt" T-shirts to give you. But we hope that you'll find the coming new features a worthy consolation prize. (We'll talk a bit about new features in a future post.) But enough history. Let's talk sign-ups.

We're now ready resume accepting new signups. One of the benefits of the upgrade is that we now have three regional servers available. To get started, simply choose the server physically closest to you:

USA: Please email us at support@libraryh3lp.com to request a free trial. Please include your affiliation and preferred admin username.

Europe: https://eu.libraryh3lp.com/signup
Asia: https://sg.libraryh3lp.com/signup

(Just a note, the Europe and Asia servers are currently running with self-signed HTTPS certificates. This is only temporary. We just needed a quick way to ensure that the signup process was encrypted.)

Yes, the sign-up pages are admittedly not pretty. That's to keep the riffraff out. No, not really. Because we have a sizable backlog of libraries wanting to do a LibraryH3lp trial, we decided bare-bones sign-up was better than none. We'll soon make the sign-up pages fancier. And yes, we still offer 90-day trials with no limits on features. So have at it!

More details on the new servers. Not only have we overhauled our existing US server and added new servers in Europe and Asia, but we'll be adding a fourth server in Canada in another week or so. Why all the new servers? Better performance! Because LibraryH3lp is all about real-time communication -- it's basically a real-time anything-to-anything-else technology -- the time it takes for messages to get to and from the server matters. I measure a ping-time of 100ms between the US and European servers, and 250ms between the US and Asian servers. Which means than European users should see a nice performance boost, and Asian users should OMG!!!

Screencasts for new admins. Here are a few screencasts we created to give new admins a leg up:

Users/queues:
http://screencast.com/t/ZB9isCp3PGd

Widget designer part 1:
http://screencast.com/t/c7zi5SmJ4k

Widget designer part 2:
http://screencast.com/t/IVHXXmvlE

Widget designer part 3:
http://screencast.com/t/GpuM4YhQOy

Existing users that want to move to a regional server. If you're an existing user and would like to move to one of the regional servers, this is the process:

Sign up for a trial account on the regional server closest to you, just to satisfy yourself that it will be worth the hassle of moving. Don't get too invested in your trial, as this is not your real account.
Let us know that you'd like to move. (Thanks much to those of you who have already declared a desire to move!) We'll migrate your users and queues to the new server.
You'll need to start logging into the new server via your chat clients and work on updating your web pages to point to the new URL. You may want to monitor both systems during this transitional period.
Once your web pages are updated, we can move your gateways, existing chat data, and transcripts.
You can finally stop logging into the old server.

If you begin your move to a new server before the end of August, it's free to move. After that, there is a $100 fee, because we may need to resolve conflicts between your users and queues and those of an existing user on your new server, and this is a tedious manual process. Oh, and of course you can also choose to move between LibraryH3lp and My Customer Cloud for free during this period.

Regards,

Eric

¹ We're very much aware that there are still some user-visible features missing, but they'll be added soon. The hardest work really is behind us.

Upgrade begins Sunday

2011-06-01T19:45:00.003-04:00

Hey everyone,

Just a reminder that we have a big upgrade on the way. Here is the rough timeline:

We're taking the server down Sunday, June 5, and it will probably be unavailable all day. Your web pages will still load, and all services will be shown as offline. Do not try to staff your service that day; you will not be able to log in.

We'll be bringing the server back on Monday, June 6. There will probably be multiple restarts and instability. Our goal will be to get basic services stable as soon as possible. You will be able to log in, but you might be happier if you don't.

We'll spend the rest of the week bringing up the less critical services such as gateways and getting everything re-stabilized and accustomed to load.

The admin site (especially reports) will probably be hit-or-miss most of the week. Please don't plan to run critical end of the year reports next week. (Do them tomorrow!)

We'll tweet our progress.

The great news is that once we're through this upgrade, we'll be able to start pushing out new features again. This upgrade will also allow us to re-enable new trial registrations and to provide new regional and private servers. We believe it will be worth it.

Introducing our new full time person, Amy

2011-05-22T09:02:00.000-04:00

As Eric mentioned in the last post, we've done our very best to support our users, but we haven't been able to guarantee assistance because we're spread pretty thin. We hope to change that. My name is Amy Shelton and I'll be joining the team full time starting June 1. I will be providing support as well as doing some programming.

I have been working with Eric in my spare time for about a year now to make the chat functionality contained within Libraryh3lp available to businesses of all sizes through My Customer Cloud. While working on My Customer Cloud, I've had the pleasure of working directly with multiple libraries already. I very much look forward to meeting and interacting with the Libraryh3lp community.

I'm coming to Nub Games from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory where I've worked for the past 13 years, most recently as the Head of Software Development for the Green Bank, WV site. I first met Eric and Pam about 10 years ago while Eric was working at the Observatory in Green Bank. My current professional interests are software engineering, customer service, and web application development. I've been blogging on customer service for about a year now. We're always looking for ideas and inspiration as well as guest bloggers. Drop me a line if you would like to suggest topics or submit a post.

I'm very excited to be working full time with Pam and Eric and even more excited that the extra pair of hands will translate into better support for our user community!

Upgrades and new service models on the way

2011-05-18T18:24:00.011-04:00

Summer has arrived! We have a bunch of news to share, so let's get straight to it.

New full-time person
In the past, we've done our very best to support our users, but we haven't been able to guarantee assistance because we're spread pretty thin. That's changing. We have a new, full-time person starting June 1, and she will be providing support as well as programming.

Upgrade (and new trial registrations) coming soon
The major system upgrade we mentioned in our last post is slated for the week of June 6. There will probably be a few rough days while we work out the kinks. We expect to enable new trial registrations by June 20. This upgrade will allow us to start pushing out a lot of requested features. Which brings me to...

New service models: additional regional and private servers
Most libraries have been happy to run on the shared Libraryh3lp server, physically located in Virginia and running on the Amazon EC2. But we have been receiving increasing numbers of requests from libraries wanting their own servers, or preferring to run on a server physically located someplace else.

A key element in our upgrade is easier management of multiple servers, and so we're going to be able to accommodate these requests.

Shared regional servers

What we mean by "shared server:" This is how Libraryh3lp operates now. You manage your own users and queues, and all of your data is private, but you are physically running on the same hardware as many other libraries. User and queue names have to be unique across the whole server; if another library has already taken the queue name "reference," you'll have to get a little bit creative ("uax_reference"). Hosting many libraries on the same hardware keeps costs down.

In addition to the current shared server in the US, we'll bring up new shared regional servers in Ireland (Amazon EC2), Singapore (Amazon EC2), and Canada. These new servers will improve performance and reduce latency for non-US libraries.

No change in subscription fee for any of the shared servers.

We will move existing customers to a new regional server for free up through July 31, 2011. After that, there will be a one-time fee of $100 to move since we will have to resolve conflicts with existing user and queue names. Please let us know ASAP if you know you're going to want to move to one of the new shared regional servers. (If you move, you will have to change your own web pages and update XMPP clients with the new server name.)

Private servers

What we mean by "private server:" You, or a group of libraries such as a consortium or a collaborative state-wide system, are the only ones running on a private server instance. It means you will not have to compete for the best queue names or usernames. Private servers also provide better fault isolation.

We can work with you on the domain name so that it is something like "help.yourlibrary.edu."

No activation fee. Moving from a shared server to a private server at any time is free.

Cost is dependent on location of server. For private servers in the US, we will physically locate the server as close to you as we can. Price for US private servers will be $100/month plus whatever the population-based subscription would ordinarily cost.

We do not yet have a pricing model for non-US private servers, but please contact us if you are interested and we will work it out for you.

SSL certificates (for HTTPS): Self-signed certs, or certs purchased by your own institution, will be installed for free. If we obtain an SSL cert for you, there will be a fee of $200/yr.

Sorry, but we will not install the system on your own hardware.

Whew! I think that about sums it up for now. If you need to contact us about any of this, please email support@nubgames.com. All prices above are in US dollars.

You can still haz. Just a little later.

2011-03-09T17:51:00.005-05:00

Hey everyone,

A couple of weeks ago, we temporarily suspended registration of new Libraryh3lp trial accounts. Although we indicated that this was a temporary situation and that new trials would again be available this summer, we're hearing a fair bit of inaccurate rumor mill stuff, so we feel the need to provide more detail.

Why did we disable new Libraryh3lp signups? Plain and simple: heavy load.

Libraryh3lp has grown tremendously, approximately doubling each year. We're at a point now where the system is under a pretty amazing amount of strain for its current architecture. New trials only increase this load, and we still need to be able to survive the peak usage months this semester. April promises to bring a new record amount of traffic. New trials would only increase the chance of instability for existing customers, many of which have paid money for subscriptions.

Proof:

In order to get Libraryh3lp over the next anticipated growth wall, we need to release a large upgrade. The coding work is underway. When we push out this new release, it will be somewhat disruptive, and there will be lots of bugs to be squashed in the weeks following the upgrade. This is better done over the summer than it is during the peak usage time in the Spring semester.

Also, keep in mind that Libraryh3lp has always been about providing a pretty much unlimited platform. You can create any number of users, queues, and gateways. You can put the widget and presence calls on any number of web pages. All of this does, in fact, require a pretty serious technical infrastructure. We could throttle growth and usage by placing all sorts of limits on things like users, queues, widget loads, and presence calls. But, we really believe in making this system very flexible, so we haven't done that.

Now, to some specific rumors:

Libraryh3lp has been sold. Patently false.
We are forcing libraries to use My Customer Cloud. Also false. But, MCC is a very good place to start if you're a wanna-be Libraryh3lp user. MCC still has plenty of capacity for new users. AND, for many libraries, MCC is cheaper than Libraryh3lp.

And, as another option, keep Refchatter by Altarama in mind. It is also very similar to Libraryh3lp, having the same code base, and it comes with guaranteed training and support (which Libraryh3lp does not).

If you'd like to be notified when new Libraryh3lp registrations are available again this summer, please write to Pam at psessoms@gmail.com.

One small favor: If you are a current user, please check your Account Status tab in the admin site. We haven't had a lot of time to do proactive renewal billing, and it saves us a lot of time when libraries renew independently using the form in the site or at least write to us requesting an invoice. Help keep Libraryh3lp inexpensive by not requiring us to hire a billing person!

Over and out!

Super cool new SMS gateway: Twilio

2010-06-21T19:49:00.006-04:00

[edited 10/5/2010 to add: People! We're glad you like the Twilio gateway, but do not rush off and create your own Twilio account. In order for it to work with libraryh3lp as a gateway, we (as in the libraryh3lp people) have to acquire the phone number for you. Full instructions below.]

We're excited to announce our newest SMS gateway. This one is backed by Twilio and by all indications is extremely robust. It features:

A phone number for your patrons to text.
Nearly instant message delivery. No polling interval.
Automatic notification to the patron when the library is offline.
Offline messages are delivered the next time your queue comes online.
Not free, but very affordable.
And of course, it integrates into LibraryH3lp like all our other gateways. Text messages can be transferred to other librarians, transcripts stored, statistics gathered, etc...

Specifics:

Cost is $1/month per phone number.
Messages are $0.03 each. 1,000 messages is $30.00
This is at-cost and is exactly what Twilio charges; there is no LibraryH3lp markup.
Currently, only US phone numbers are available via Twilio for SMS. However, international text messages can be sent and received.
Voice phone calls can be redirected to your regular library phone number.

To be clear, each message (not conversation) is $0.03. So, the following is $0.06:

Patron: anyone there?

Librarian: Yes

If you want a Twilio SMS gateway, please write to Eric, and specify:

the queue you want it installed on,
your top-level admin name,
your desired area code for the phone number, and
the phone number you want voice calls to go to.

We will acquire your Twilio phone number. We cannot currently make the gateway work with a Twilio number you acquire on your own.

If you are currently a Google Voice SMS gateway user, and you want to have your Google Voice SMS's forwarded to Twilio, let Eric know and he can set that up as well. (Please specify your GVoice SMS gateway's queue.) This way, your patrons keep texting you at the same number, but their messages will come through instantly.

How do I pay for this?

Please do not pay Twilio directly!

Use this payment page.

Nothing expires at the end of a year; it's really just a lump of money used to fund both the phone number and the messages.

If you want some other amount, let us know and we can set up a payment page for it. You can purchase any arbitrary amount of messages.

What sets this one apart from our other two SMS gateways?

Unlike the Google Voice SMS gateway, Twilio has public APIs. It has been created specifically so that developers like Eric can use it within their own applications. This means it will be much more stable and have much faster message delivery than the Google Voice SMS gateway.

And unlike our Android phone SMS gateway, libraries do not need to purchase a phone and keep it connected to reliable network and power.

Why do we keep changing SMS solutions?

To be clear, neither of the other two SMS gateways are going away.

We want our SMS gateways to be affordable and to allow patrons to text a phone number. When we started, the Android gateway was the only way we could come up with to accomplish that. Developer solutions were quite expensive. Then, when Google Voice came along, we adopted that very quickly and have implemented that gateway as best we can, but since there is no public API, it's fragile when Google makes changes (we knew this going into it and were very open about this fact).

Now, Twilio is here and is a big leap forward. It is a great fit with LibraryH3lp. We hope you'll enjoy it!

(Twilio is also available for My Customer Cloud users.)

[original message edited 9/15 to clarify sign-up info and to add payment info]
[edited again 7/12/2011 to fix payment links]

Introducing My Customer Cloud

2010-06-13T19:43:00.002-04:00

My Customer Cloud is another new product in the LibraryH3lp family. Because LibraryH3lp has gotten so popular over the last few years, I regularly get signups even from outside of the library/academic community. In order to better serve the non-library users, I've expanded the company and taken on a new programming partner. We've created this additional product with a new usage-based pricing model in order to best accommodate everyone.

Rather than paying an annual subscription fee based on FTE or service population, My Customer Cloud users can pay per-chat, only for what they use, and still have access to all the features and integrations that LibraryH3lp users have come to expect.

But it's not just for non-libraries. The annual LibraryH3lp subscription model exists primarily because of stodgy, antiquated library purchasing policies. (Sorry, but you know it's true.) Libraries that can be a little more flexible in their spending now have the opportunity to pay less by choosing My Customer Cloud. Low chat volume libraries may wind up paying even less using My Customer Cloud, while busier services will probably find it cheaper to go with LibraryH3lp.

So, please, check it out.

Widgets for Individuals vs. Queues: A Change

2010-06-06T15:00:00.005-04:00

Since LibraryH3lp started, we've handled widget chats differently based on whether they were for an individual librarian or for a queue. Specifically, chats for queues had a number of special features:

they could be transferred;
files could be shared between librarians and patrons;
the patron's IP address and referring URL displayed to librarians in the webchat client;
queues could have profile pages viewable via the webchat client; and
transcripts could be stored in the admin site, with statistical reports also available.

Chats for widgets pointing to individual librarians lacked all of those features.

This often led admins designing chat services to create a queue for each of their librarians, with exactly one librarian assigned to each queue. This way, chats targeted to those librarians would have all the extra flexibility associated with queues.

This practice has become especially prevalent in service rollover models, where chats are routed to a subject expert, if available, but will fall over to a general reference service if the expert is not available. With their very own queue, the subject expert could transfer their patron to another librarian or to another queue as needed.

That workaround was fine, but it created extra work for the local admin, and it increased the overall confusion level.

Today, we rolled out a series of fundamental behind-the-scenes changes that blur the line between individuals and queues where widget chats are concerned. Now, widget chats for individuals:

can be transferred;
will display patron's IP and referring URL in the webchat client; and
allow file sharing between patrons and librarians.

There is still more work to do to further integrate this change into the admin site. Profile pages, transcript storage and statistics for individual widgets will become available in a later update.

A very important point: this change is only for chats using widgets. Direct IMs between librarians via the buddy list remain and will continue to remain private. They cannot be logged or transferred. Individuals should be buddied as user@libraryh3lp.com.

We'll be updating the docs to reflect this change. In the meantime, the preferred syntax for creating widgets for individuals AND queues is:

http://libraryh3lp.com/chat/whatever@chat.libraryh3lp.com

The old widget syntax for individuals (http://libraryh3lp.com/chat/user@libraryh3lp.com) will continue to work.

We know it can be confusing for our existing users when we change fundamental concepts, but LibraryH3lp continues to be an evolving system undergoing improvements. This change should make life easier overall, especially for new users. We do not think that the change will break any existing code, and we hope that most librarians will welcome the new functionality.

Migration Round-Up

2010-02-14T19:22:00.002-05:00

Whew. The migration really went pretty well. Widget chats on queues were working by 9am Saturday. SMS, Google Talk, and Twitter gateways followed a bit later on Saturday. The remaining IM gateways came back Sunday morning. We believe that all of the pieces of the system are available. Load looks very good!

There is one thing about gateways you may need to know about: for now, you can only have one gateway on any given protocol on any single queue. Example: on one queue, you can have one AIM gateway, one Yahoo! gateway, one Meebo Me gateway, etc... You cannot have two AIM gateways on one queue currently. If you need to have more than one gateway on a given protocol, create additional queues, add your extra gateways, and assign the desired librarians. Or just chill out for two days while Eric fixes it.

This happened because when we migrated to the EC2, we found that our previous family of libpurple gateways were consuming far too many resources because of a bug involving updated versions of two core OS libraries. So, we switched our libpurple family gateways over to use the Spectrum XMPP transport, which runs far more efficiently. This just needs a bit more tweaking so that it will support multiple gateways of the same protocol per queue.

Other than that, we believe things are in good shape. Please let us know if you find bugs. We'll continue to use the Twitter feed to communicate issues as the week begins.

Migration to new host Saturday morning, Feb 13

2010-02-08T18:43:00.002-05:00

Heads-up.

In an effort to increase system stability, we will be moving LibraryH3lp to a new host this coming Saturday morning, Feb 13, 2010. Saturday mornings (we're in the Eastern time zone) are very low-use.

While we can't provide an exact time frame, we expect the server to be completely unavailable for up to 1 or 2 hours as we migrate data.

We have already completed the work with the DNS, which means that the step with the most potential for causing lengthy server unavailability is done.

As previously discussed on our support group, in order to prevent embedded LibraryH3lp content from slowing down loading of your web pages in times of server outages, you can move the javascript to the very end of your web page. Ideally, this is right before the close body tag of your document. All the details, and a way to test your code, are here, in the docs.

Now, why are we moving? We've recently experienced a few failures completely beyond our control, coupled with some pretty poor communication from our hosting service. We can accept that a hardware failure can happen at any time, on any system. But we expect this kind of failure to be... rare. No one has made anything quite like LibraryH3lp before; we work hard to make this thing as stable as possible, even while we're building it and creating new features. It's no fun to put so much work into this system and get let down by the infrastructure that we (you) are paying for.

As always, we'll post system status updates as we go on our Twitter feed. If you want to get notices of activity on the Twitter feed over email, SMS, or some other format, check out notify.me.

We do apologize for the inconvenience. We'll do everything we can to make this migration as quick and painless as possible.

New Gateways: Twitter and Google Talk via Google Apps

2010-01-18T18:51:00.003-05:00

Two new gateways! Well, one new and one upgraded.

Twitter. Every once in awhile, someone asks about Twitter integration. We tried this before with a gateway that worked via direct messages, but it proved too cumbersome in practice as direct messages require reciprocal following. The new one released today works on mentions (@username messages). The setup is like any other LibraryH3lp gateway.

Your librarians can identify these messages when they arrive because they'll start with @username. Librarians can simply reply to these; they do not need to start the message with @ since the gateway will take care of this. The next version of the librarian's webchat client will provide a character countdown for twitter messages.

Second, Google Apps. Google Talk for Google Apps users works with our standard Google Talk gateway now. For your username, use your full address. Example: my.name@myschool.edu. The gateway will take care of the rest.

All code available on github.

Enjoy!