Since January, we’ve had a chat box on our home page. Law School and other UW-Madison students, faculty & staff can use it to ask legal research questions of our reference librarians.
The chat box is courtesy of a service called Plugoo. The questions asked through the chat box are routed to our regular IM accounts which we monitor through Trillian. [To learn how to establish a virtual reference service with IM and chat, see my article IM a Librarian: Establishing a Virtual Reference Service with Little Cost or Technical Skill.]
For some reason, today our chat call volume has gone through the roof. Several times we had multiple simultaneous Plugoo chats. Wait a minute–Plugoo can handle multiple simultaneous chats??? That’s awesome!
I checked out the Plugoo FAQ and it still indicates that “At the moment, Plugoo offers you to chat with one single visitor.” But, thankfully, blogger Terrance Chang gives the run-down on how Plugoo multichat works – complete with screen shots.