Library Voice

I had another IM reference interaction tonight. The really cool thing about this particular interaction is that it was someone who had IMed me about a month ago. While business is a little slow, it’s nice to know that I am at least getting repeat customers.

I first put my IM profiles on my contact information page about six months ago. However, I did not have any business at all. That all changed when I put the IM profiles on my Business Blog. Traffic has picked up considerably since then, and eight in the last month is a pretty good start.

After delivering library instruction to several first-year business classes, I gave the students a short survey to fill out. Most of the questions were aimed to provide feedback about the instruction session. The last question was about instant messaging usage. I asked:

If you use instant messaging (IM), which service do you use? If you have more than one IM account, please indicate which one you use the most.

Of the 138 respondents:
89.1 % use AIM
.7% use MSN
1.4% use Yahoo! IM
.7% use ICQ
1.4% use another service
and 6.5% don’t use instant messaging.

While this was not necessarily the most scientific survey, it does show that AIM appears to be the client of choice for this small sample of freshmen. Also, in the last month I have had seven students contact me personally via IM. All of those who contacted me were using AIM.

Personally, I am not a big fan of AIM, or of AOL in general. I would much rather use Yahoo!’s IM service exclusively, because I appreciate the Yahoo! Messenger’s features and lack of ads. However, I continue to start up both sevices each morning, because our patrons(and perhaps the rest of the world) are using AIM as their primary IM client. And, as always, the customer is always right.