David Lee King added Meebo to his library's online catalog. The Meebo widget allows people to access instant messaging from anywhere. David added it to the catalog so patrons who do an keyword search within the catalog and doesn't find anything they can contact the library via IM and ask for help.

It is interesting twist on the catalog to make it even more interactive. I would like to know more from David as to what ILS system he is using and whether this could be done easily with other systems. I would like to know how much programming is needed for this, is it something that smaller libraries without IT departments (or with difficult IT departments) could easily do. Finally I would like to know how much use it is getting? Just curious.

I can see this application working with electronic databases as well. Instead of the Ask a Librarian email link, it could go directly to a chat session.