Well, I’m not quite sure why IM poses a more significant threat to privacy than any of the alternative means of communication. Those for whom this is a concern would probably best be served through email or telephone reference. Meanwhile, the vast majority of our users who actually prefer AIM or Yahoo, and who use them all the time, have every right to expect that libraries offer services on their terms.

Surely, “library ethics” implies serving the public — in the most effective way the public deems fit. More and more, we have libraries that are realizing this and that’s a very good thing.

Library ethics require true choice and consent … that is, the same service should be available to those who do not agree to share PII.

Well, I’d think that the first “library policy” would be to communicate to your users using their prefered means of communication. We do it all the time — and run all the same “risks” — when communicating to people whose email addresses end in ‘yahoo.com’ or ‘gmail.com’.

In other words, I don’t see this as a major hurdle.

I am proud to say my library, Morrisville College Library (http://library.morrisville.edu), has been doing chat reference with AIM for many years. We are also using a blog combined with RSS feeds to add dynamic content to our webpages. The content is not very dynamic this time of year with just summer classes but it is during the normal college fall and spring semesters. I am using an open source blog (Blosxom) with an open source OS (Ubuntu Linix) on an open source web server (Apache) using RSStoHTML script. It allruns on an old IBM desktop,

That’s said, it’s sure as hell, convenient! I think the way the search box was implemented at Notre Dame is pretty neat.

The sites all have their strengths — looking pretty being an important one. Other strenghts include the way that Princeton uses top navigation, how you navigate subjects at BYU, the clean lines and layout of Indiana. I like them all.

Sorry…just a pet peeve of mine with library websites.