IM the catalog

This is something that came up on The Shifted Librarian a little while ago. The idea of an Instant Messenger client as an interface to the catalog. I got this working for our catalog today using the Net::AIM perl module.

Getting it working was suprisingly simple in the end. However, there are still some questions in my mind:

Should we be offering a variety of search types? (So far I've just done an 'All Words' search on any text IMed to the AIMbot). If so, what should the search syntax be?
How should the results be navigated? How many results is it useful to return at one time?
How can we offer this on a variety of IM networks - not just AOL?
How much work would it take to make this a more 'natural' interface (adding perhaps more conversational type stuff, perhaps 'reference interview' type questions)

I'm not running the AIM client at the moment as I need to do a bit more testing before I'm ready for this to be made public. However, if anyone is interested in trialling it, they can get in touch.

Comments

[Karen Coombs]

Owen,

This is SO great. I'd love to help you play with it. Wish I had done it first but just glad to see someone doing such cool stuff!

Karen

[Jenny Levine]

Fan-tastic! Damn, I wish I could program. I'd love to help play with it, though. Who is your ILS vendor?

[Owen]

Thanks for the comments - I hope to have something at the end of this week to allow some testing. The library system is the Ex Libris Aleph system, and the nice thing about it is that there is an xml interface to the catalogue, which makes it easier to build this type of thing on top of it. I suspect that the real issue here is going to be how effective this type of interface can be. I need to look at some of the other existing aim bots to see how there interfaces work... any suggestions would be welcome.