A few CUNY+ suggestions
Posted by Stephen Francoeur on March 15, 2008
A couple of quick ideas about making CUNY+ a richer experience for our users.
- Give users viewing an item record a “text me the details” link that would send the call number and title as a text message to the user’s cell phone. Once the link is clicked, the user types in his/her cell phone number and receives a text message that is less likely to be lost than the scraps of paper our patrons usually rely on. Idea courtesy of Ryan Eby of the Ann Arbor District Library (MI).
- Offer users a link to chat reference (or a chat widget) on the “no results found” pages. The link/widget would only appear in your local catalog. For those of CUNY libraries with a QuestionPoint subscription (Baruch, BMCC, Brooklyn, Graduate Center, Hunter, and John Jay), we’d offer the Qwidget (the QuestionPoint chat widget). I’ve already floated this by Roland Samieske, who is looking into it. Idea courtesy of David Lee King of the Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library (KS).
Anne Leonard said
Another idea for enriching the CUNY+ experience: give users the option of receiving reminders about CLICS items for pickup, approaching due dates, etc., via sms as well as email. And why not allow users to pay fines via sms using paypal?
Stephen Francoeur said
Good suggestions, Anne. I’d like to see us develop as many services as possible that are available via the cell phone: reference; renewals; notifications of pickup of ILL or CLICS items; database search, etc.
Stephen Francoeur said
Here’s another idea that I ran across from Jason Griffey on his blog, Pattern Recognition: find a way to allow students to use their camera phones to check out books. See his blog post for details.