Karen, we are building out a custom chat reference system with our new website redesign based on jabber.  Basically you will see all of the reference librarians who are logged in to the jabber server with a little picture/avatar along with their specialty areas.  The question is - who becomes the "catch all" - general reference librarian.  So we wanted to experiment with a chat bot and a reference script one of our reference librarians wrote up.  So if the student is totally clueless and doesn't know which librarian to pick - they can chat with a chat bot .... or maybe we will hire Ms. Dewey!  Dunno if it will work out well - but something we want to play around with.  Then we could hook it up to our libstats implementation and automatically record all transactions.  An idea that we are just experimenting with at this stage.  I'll let you know when/if I get something up and running.

Andrew

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
> K.G. Schneider
> Sent: Monday, December 03, 2007 12:18 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] open source chat bots?
>
> On Mon, 3 Dec 2007 10:14:29 -0500, "Andrew Nagy"
> <[log in to unmask]> said:
> > Hello - there was quite a bit of talk about chat bots a year or 2
> back.
> > I was wondering if anyone knew of an open source chat bot that works
> with
> > jabber?
> >
> > Thanks
> > Andrew
>
> I'm afraid this isn't an answer, but several times last week I almost
> posted a similar query to DIG_REF. I'm interested in this response and
> in any responses that would lead to a discussion of an OSS virtual
> reference solution with critical-path VR components such as multiple
> logins, statistics, transcripts, etc.
>
> Karen G. Schneider
> [log in to unmask]