Here’s a great tip from Jenny Levine, The Shifted Librarian. For those of you pondering the issue of providing IM on your public computers, here’s a workable compromise! –Mickey
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IM on the Desktop
By Jenny
Just a reminder that if you want to offer instant messaging on your public workstations but you don’t want to install software or your IT department is worried about the security of IM apps, you can always put desktop shortcuts and quick links in the browser to the web-based versions of these IM clients and/or Meebo.
Your patrons will lose some of the great functionality of the full clients, but it’s a start, and it might be a stepping stone to offering more down the road if you’re meeting resistance. In addition, it looks to me like you circumvent some privacy issues, too, because no transcripts of conversations are saved on the hard drive. Granted, information may still be in the browser’s cache, but hopefully you’re already addressing this issue with software that clears it out after each user.
Posted on: Mon, Nov 7 2005 11:09 PM
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