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I briefly looked into Meebo for our site and decided against it. I didn't like the idea of our chat sessions being bounced to and possibly logged on a third party server. At least in our context as a public library, reference interviews should be treated as confidential by default, and chat records should be destroyed as regularly as practicable. I don't feel comfortable trusting a black box service with our patron's privacy. I know a lot of libraries use this service, but I don't agree with the practice. I haven't had an opportunity to finish it, but the solution I am developing uses an open source AJAX widget called PHPFreeChat. The current release is 1.1, and it will run off the standard LAMP stack, without the need for additional server software. I use cron jobs to clear the chat logs daily. I think this may be a viable, in house solution. It would specifically solve the security issue raised in the initial message. http://www.phpfreechat.net/ - David --- David Cloutman <[log in to unmask]> Electronic Services Librarian Marin County Free Library -----Original Message----- From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Gavin Spomer Sent: Wednesday, April 30, 2008 10:21 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: [CODE4LIB] IM For Reference Desk Hello everyone, Our reference staff has decided that they want to "keep up with the Jones'" and enable our university students to contact the reference desk via a chat interface. After a bit o research I decided to go with Meebo, specifically MeeboMe. I've also decided that I want to run it through ezproxy because of two benefits. First, this will reduce access to MeeboMe to our university students/staff. Second, if legitimate university students/staff abuse the service, they can be identified and dealt with by looking them up in the ezproxy log. But it's still not air-tight because a legitimate student/staff can just copy the embedded MeeboMe widget from the html source and put it on another web page. Chances are small that this would happen, (or are they?) but like any decent sys admin I don't like to take chances. Is anyone else on the list implementing some sort of IM at their library and if so, how are you going about implementing this? Gavin Spomer Systems Programmer Brooks Library Central Washington University Email Disclaimer: http://www.co.marin.ca.us/nav/misc/EmailDisclaimer.cfm